Hong Kong superstar Tony Leung first signed with an American agent back in 2005 but it wasn’t until Marvel came calling that he finally decided to make his Hollywood film debut. He chalks that long delay up to “fate” but either way that means that Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is the first time a broader American audiences might get a taste of something extraordinary Hong Kong cinema lovers have enjoyed for decades. Leung dug into his own history to transform a character that Marvel considered a sticky conundrum into one of the its most compelling villains.
As the antagonist of Shang-Chi, Leung’s character Wenwu spent eons of his supernaturally extended life conquering the world thanks to the ten deadly rings he wears on his arm. But Wenwu also happens to be the father of the film’s titular hero making for very personal stakes in a genre that often takes its conflicts to a global, if not galactic scale. Sure, there’s plenty of precedent for bad-dad narratives in our popular culture but if you’re expecting something like Marvel’s answer to Darth Vader, think again. Vader and his late-in-the-trilogy turn to the light-side is pure iconography but with Wenwu Marvel presents something much messier where light and dark continuously mix and mingle. To pull off a villain that complicated, Shang-Chi’s filmmakers needed someone who could seduce even as he repulsed. In other words: Tony Leung.
Western fans of Leung will often cite his romantic collaborations with director Wong Kar-wai such as In the Mood for Love, Chungking Express, Happy Together, and 2046 as where they first discovered his ability to mesmerize an audience with just a look. (He’s known in China as “The Man Who Can Speak with His Eyes.”) Leung told Vanity Fair that his 2013 collaboration with Kar-wai, The Grandmaster in which he plays Bruce Lee’s martial arts trainer, Ip Man, is one he might recommend any Shang-Chi fans check out next.
But his darker, more morally conflicted turns in 2002’s Infernal Affairs — the inspiration for Martin Scorsese’s The Departed — and, especially, Ang Lee’s 2007 film Lust, Caution might be the better indicator of what to expect from Leung in Shang-Chi. Neither of those films is remotely kid-friendly, but in Wenwu that blend of sex, romance, and violence also courses underneath the surface of Marvel’s PG-13 superhero film.
Early in the film, audiences see Wenwu’s first encounter with Shang-Chi’s mother Ying Li (Fala Chen). The meet-cute takes the form of an intense martial battle. “It’s a really interesting scene to shoot,” Leung said through a translator. “It almost feels like the animal instinct. How you meet each other for the first time and then the animals will fight and they tease and they’d get turned on. So that’s the kind of relationship that I thought about in this scene.”
The MCU has a reputation for being a largely sexless franchise. That’s not terrible when you consider that the target audience is quite young, but begins to be a problem as Marvel’s brand of storytelling sucks up more and more oxygen in the filmmaking industry. Despite the MCU’s extremely telegenic leads, really only Thor: Ragnarok has brought any kind of true sexuality to the table. That is until Tony Leung strode down a hallway in slow motion, his suit jacket sleeves rolled up and deadly rings glinting up his forearms.
Part of that swagger was entirely practical. Because Leung was never actually wearing the titular rings during production, his arms were marked with “dots” that acted as markers for the post-production CGI. It was only when he saw the completed film that Leung realized how “cool” the rings looked. But in order to show them off, costume designer Kym Barrett had to design a series of looks that left the arms exposed. Leung says his first costume fitting is where he really began to understand the core of his character.
“The way Tony plays Wenwu is just so damn cool,” Shang-Chi writer/director Destin Daniel Cretton told Vanity Fair. “Kym really contributed to that coolness. In order for the rings to work, she had to roll up the suit jacket sleeves and it just created this relaxed look. He’d be wearing sandals with suits and rolled up sleeves with the rings. When we saw it, I was just like: ‘Man, that’s the coolest guy.’”
But swagger is really only a small fraction of Wenwu who is also a classically romantic Leung character. He may be the head of the Ten Rings terrorist organization and completely terrifying when fighting and conquering, but Wenwu’s is also driven, throughout, by love and Leung’s particular specialty: longing. That’s due to the surprisingly emotional script Cretton wrote with Dave Callaham and Andrew Lanham but Cretton also credits Leung with bringing even more romanticism to the table.
“He infused everything with love which was surprising,” Cretton says. “I asked him in the middle of shooting whether he thought Wenwu truly loved his kids and he didn’t hesitate. He said he has always loved his kids he just has no idea how. That was a really big epiphany for me.”
Tony Leung was one of the first actors to sign on to the project and cites Cretton’s “sincerity” in their first conversation as the reason he decided Shang-Chi is where he would make his Hollywood debut. Leung has also said that he long avoided playing fathers in films because he didn’t want to be reminded of how his own father treated him.
“I’m talking to Tony Leung and I was scared out of my mind,” Cretton recalls. “I did feel this intense pressure of trying to pitch him this movie in the right way. Usually when I freak out like that I just try to have a real conversation, which is surprisingly what happened. I had no idea that Tony would be so open and unguarded. We talked about family and pain and the themes of this movie. I left the conversation not having any idea if he was going to do the movie but I got to have a really great conversation with Tony Leung. So I was happy.”
Though the basic bones of the character of Wenwu didn’t change once Tony Leung came on board, Callaham says the performance took the story to much more profound places. “Until you get someone like Tony,” he says, “You don’t know exactly where it’s gonna land. There’s a version that could have been much more arch and unhinged and therefore less relatable. I know that sounds crazy for people who haven’t seen the movie, but I would suggest that as a villain, though he takes extreme measures, when you get down to what he really wants and what’s driving him, it’s this very personal stuff that I think is relatable.”
All of this emotional shading from Leung was especially vital to the success of Wenwu because the character comes pre-loaded with more MCU baggage than usual. The comic book character known as The Mandarin was originally meant to appear in very early drafts of 2008’s Iron Man. The studio opted to leave the character out for a number of reasons including a concern with how to handle a comic book character that leant into some of the worst Asian stereotypes.
Marvel grappled for years with how to engage with the Asian characters in its catalogue. In 2013’s Iron Man 3, the studio attempted a twist on the idea of The Mandarin by hiring Sir Ben Kingsley to play a washed up actor named Trevor Slattery who was merely posing as the leader of The Ten Rings. All the stereotypical baggage, then, became part of an over-the-top performance. “My approach to the Mandarin was inspired by the reason why I couldn’t use the original,” Iron Man 3 screenwriter Drew Pearce said in a recent interview. “It’s very much a yellow peril stereotype with a particularly unsavory edge of propaganda used in this era.” Marvel chief Kevin Feige stands by that decision.
In 2016 Marvel again attempted to dodge stereotypes by casting Tilda Swinton as Doctor Strange’s Ancient One instead of the elderly Asian man he is in the comics. Again that meant a white actor got a job that might have gone to an Asian performer. This decision Feige regrets. “We thought we were being so smart, and so cutting-edge,” he recently told Men’s Health. “We’re not going to do the cliché of the wizened, old, wise Asian man. But it was a wake-up call to say, ‘Well, wait a minute, is there any other way to figure it out? Is there any other way to both not fall into the cliché and cast an Asian actor?’ And the answer to that, of course, is yes.”
Enter Wenwu and the entirety of Shang-Chi as an attempt to put right what once went wrong with Asian representation in the MCU. Wenwu laughs at the idea that anyone would call him “The Mandarin,” but he is meant to be the “real” version of that character and the true leader of the Ten Rings. “The easier part of it is what came before in [comic book] publishing,” Callaham says. “Marvel understood that they couldn’t use it. Shang-Chi is presented as a pretty basic Bruce Lee rip-off and Eastern philosophy stereotype. More problematically, his father is actually named Fu Manchu. The harder part is what came before in the MCU. I’m not going to speak for creative decisions that were made 10 years ago”
Callaham said the key was an excellent Marvel One-Shot short film All Hail the King that Drew Pearce put together in 2014 which saw Ben Kingsley’s Trevor threatened by the “real” Mandarin a.k.a. Wenwu. “I don’t know if retcon is a bad word in this kind of context because I know fans don’t always love it when something gets changed as if it had never happened,” Callaham says. “I don’t think that’s what we’re doing here. We were just adding a new context to make the past make sense and make the future palatable.”
In Shang-Chi’s only heavy-handed scene, Wenwu ruminates on Trevor, his own legacy, and the moniker of The Mandarin. “I just feel very happy that the conversation isn’t even remotely about a potential stereotype,” Cretton says. “It’s just about a cool character, which is what we really hoped for. The biggest danger of Wenwu was him being a one dimensional stereotype. To see audience’s response to Tony’s version of this character is very satisfying.”
It’s intriguing that Callaham and Cretton — both Asian-American fathers who come with their own healthy dose of style and swagger — seem to relate more to Wenwu than they do to their titular hero. “I was excited,” Cretton admits, “to explore the things that I have in common with Wenwu.” As a director, Cretton excels in emotionally complex stories as seen in previous films like Short Term 12 and Just Mercy and Leung is the ideal conduit to give this Marvel popcorn adventure that added Cretton heft.
“The story is sad and tragic. Tony can play that stuff better than anybody on earth, right?” Callaham says. “Suddenly we have the ability to do all the cool physical stuff that Marvel is always going to be able to do but we have this actor that can bring empathy for his character to a point where — I don’t know, I’m very biased — I think Wenwu is up there on the list of MCU villains that people are gonna really respond to, I think that is very largely due to Tony being able to carry off the human sides of a fabulous character.”
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