How Bruce Lee-inspired series Warrior gave Hong Kong actor Jason Tobin a second life

“It was my dad, a British expat, who introduced me to Bruce Lee,” says Jason Tobin, still sweaty after a workout at ATP gym, in Central. “He wanted me to have an Asian male role model. To see an Asian role model.”

The 45-year-old actor is hardly alone in revering his­tory’s most famous martial artist. Tobin is, however, unique in bringing to life a role Lee himself failed to get onto the screen before break­ing Hollywood’s Asian ceiling with Enter the Dragon (1973). Cinemax’s runaway hit series Warrior – season two just wrapped – is a story Lee wrote before Tobin was even born.

Fifty years ago, Hollywood was less multicultural than today, making 2019 “the right time and place for Lee’s vision to come to thrilling life”, raved Rolling Stone’s review of season one. “Even if he’s not around to star in it.”

Warrior’s plot is well known to Lee fans: set in the 1870s, during the Tong wars, as rival Chinatown gangs sought territory in burgeoning American cities, a Chinese immi­grant skilled in martial arts heads to San Francisco looking for his sister, who is fleeing an abusive husband in China.

Just how much 1970s television classic Kung Fu, which starred David Carradine as a Shaolin monk wandering the American West, borrowed from the original concept remains hotly debated. Lee’s widow, Linda, has said Warner executives, fearing audiences weren’t ready for an Asian hero, took the idea and cast a Caucasian lead.

Tobin is no stranger to this story. Born in Hong Kong to an English father and Chinese mother, and attending schools in Britain and the Philippines, as well as Hong Kong, he knows a thing or two about racial politics. Aside from pursuing his burgeoning interest in acting, he took up karate to fend off bullies. In Essex, he says, “It was easy for a young Chinese kid in an all-white boarding school to get picked on.”

In Hong Kong, young Jason read Michael Caine’s 1990 book, Acting in Film, on the No 10 bus from Pok Fu Lam to Admiralty on the way to King George V School in Ho Man Tin, and dreamed of movie stardom, although the idea conjured laughter among friends. Growing up, he absorbed Lee’s every on-screen move and mannerism. Here was a charismatic figure, mixing East and West, blending acting with serious fighting. Here was a hero he could call his own.

After his parents divorced, Tobin bounced between schools. Back in Britain, his mother, widowed by the death of her second husband, would take her film-crazy son to the cinema, but would always wait outside in the car.

“I didn’t know at the time,” says Tobin, “but she didn’t come inside because she didn’t have enough money for her own ticket.”

In 1993, Tobin left Hong Kong and moved to Los Angeles. His goal was simple: become a Hollywood movie star, just like his boyhood idol.

Sadly, little had changed. Just as Lee had been side­lined – a martial-arts master playing second fiddle Kato to a flabby Green Hornet – so Tobin found himself getting calls to put on a black suit and play “Asian Gangster X”.

Tobin collected such credits for close to a decade, often counting loose change to buy 99-cent burgers at McDonald’s. He tried everything to stand out from the sea of black-suited Asian gangsters, even dyeing his hair blond and dropping his British accent.

“I wouldn’t wish my first seven or eight years in LA on anyone,” says Tobin from the gym in Central, where he has just finished a workout designed to prepare him for long days on set filled with choreographed fight scenes. His mood is upbeat but reflective – reminiscing about tougher times touches on a wound not fully healed. “My career has been littered with moments of complete despair. So many times I’ve felt down and out; on the canvas, face down.”

Tobin’s first break came at age 27, with Better Luck Tomorrow, an official Sundance Film Festival selection in 2002. The Justin Lin crime drama featured an all Asian-American cast, which was virtually unheard of at the time.

“Every actor dreams of being in an indie film that goes to Sundance, becomes a hit, and then they become some­thing from it,” he says.

But on the way back from a celebratory holiday in Buenos Aires with his mother, and having just put her on a flight to Britain, he was detained at Atlanta airport. Tobin didn’t know it, but he had previously overstayed a United States visa. He spent 14 hours in a holding cell.

“I’ll tell you, man,” he says, shaking his head, “you really get a lot of time to think in a place like that.”

Tobin was forced to return to Argentina. He had enjoyed his holiday there and made friends, and he was in search of something different from the endless casting calls of LA, so he spent the next year in the South American country, backpacking and learning Spanish.

Following his unplanned Argentina detour, he ended up in London, but found many similarities with LA’s vacuous acting scene. He felt his career might be over by the time he hit 30.

Discouraged, he recalled a pilgrimage he had made while in the US, driving his Honda Fit across three states to the grave­side of Lee, buried alongside his son, Brandon, at Lake View Cemetery, in Seattle. The trip had been a goal since childhood, but he was also desperately looking for meaning in all the hard years he had put into his career with so little to show for it.

“I was surprised at how many fans left messages and flowers and gifts at his grave,” Tobin recalls. “And I thought, ‘I need to say something.’” He took out his road map and scrawled a message. “I don’t know exactly what I wrote, something like, ‘20 years, 8,000 miles, 20 hours’ driving to come here and say thank you for getting me through my childhood.’ He meant that much to me. I got back in my car and I drove off, weeping for a man I’d never met.”

In 2002, fresh from the success of Better Luck Tomorrow, Lin contacted Lee’s daughter, Shannon, who had taken over her father’s archival material in 2000. “Justin just called me up and said, ‘I’ve always heard this story that your father wrote a treatment for a US TV show but it didn’t get made and they wouldn’t cast him. Is that true?’” LA-based Shannon said in a previous interview.

It came to nothing at the time, but in 2006, Lin was asked to direct The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. He cast Tobin as Earl, a friend of the film’s Asian lead, played by Sung Kang. It was far from a starring role, but it landed Tobin an advocate in Lin – and a fresh US work permit.

When Lin started developing Warrior, he put Tobin’s name forward to showrunner Jonathan Tropper. At the time, Tobin, was working multiple jobs back in Hong Kong, including standing in police line-ups for HK$800 a pop.

“At that point I didn’t even have an agent any more,” he says, chuckling.

Tobin auditioned for Warrior’s starring role, a character modelled after Lee himself: a dark, brooding figure, as stoic as he is violent. While it seemed like a dream part, Tobin felt it might not be right. “I knew in my heart that the role wasn’t quite for me, but I also had this gut feeling … ‘I bet there’s another one I’m just perfect for.’”

He played it cool during the audition for the part of murderous gang leader Young Jun, a hard-drinking thug with a soft side, who befriends the Lee archetype, Ah Sahm. Tobin tried to find some sense of nuance in the bombastic character, but it fell flat. So when Tropper gave him a second chance, he went all in.

“I could almost hear Bruce Lee saying to me, calmly: ‘Express yourself, and do it honestly.’ I just thought, ‘If I’m going to play Young Jun for the next four or five years, I have to play it in the way that I enjoy it.’”

Tropper says Tobin’s second attempt is forever etched in his memory. “Jason asked if I minded if he went off script a bit. I told him to go for it. So when he did his second audi­tion, he really went for it, throwing in his own lines and dialogue and bringing the character to life. I was imme­diately sold,” he says.

Within hours, the contracts were coming through for the biggest role of his career.

Tobin had married his Chinese-Australian wife, Michelle, after a whirlwind romance in 2013, and they quickly started a family. The couple have a five-year-old and twin three-year-olds.

After a quarter of a century of struggle and scraping by, he is a family man with the means to comfortably support his wife and children. But part of him is still that kid glued to the TV, watching Bruce Lee films, starry-eyed and dreaming of being on screen.

Maybe, after attending to the tens of thousands of fans who petition at his grave every year, Lee finally got around to young Jason.

“I’m getting goosebumps just talking about this,” confides Tobin. “If there ever was a dream role for me, this is it.”