Into the Badlands' Daniel Wu on playing the lead on American TV

The stars appear to be aligning for actor Daniel Wu Yin-cho: his latest film, Go Away Mr Tumour (now showing in Hong Kong cinemas), hasn't only been a gigantic box-office hit in China, it is also the country's entry in the foreign-language Oscar category; and his next movie is Duncan Jones' Warcraft. But let it be known that the 41-year-old doesn't have world domination on his mind.

"It's not at all my objective to become an Asian-American star," says Wu, the lead actor and executive producer of AMC's latest show, . He says it only occurred to him recently that he's now become that rare animal on American television: an Asian lead. " This will only be significant in proving that American tastes are evolving if [ Into the Badlands] succeeds," he says, cautiously.

Created by writers-showrunners Alfred Gough and Miles Millar (Smallville) and shot in New Orleans, the six-episode martial-arts series is set in a dystopian world where the last traces of civilisation reside in territories controlled by wicked feudal barons. Working for one of these is cold-blooded assassin Sunny (Wu), who embarks on a spiritual journey with a boy, M.K. (Aramis Knight), in tow.

Into the Badlands may remind some viewers of Kung Fu, which saw David Carradine fight his way across the Wild West, and Wu admits that the possibility of remaking the 1970s show was, indeed, floated early in the creative process.

"I was like, 'Please don't.' The fight scenes were not so great and the Eastern philosophy was so fortune-cookie," he says, with a chuckle.