In Shang-Chi, Leung’s Wenwu is the leader of the terrorist group Ten Rings and the estranged father of the eponymous superhero ( Simu Liu). The key distinction with his latest action film is that it marks the 59-year-old actor’s Hollywood debut. There’s also the 2013 drama The Grandmaster, featuring Leung as the renowned martial artist Ip Man simultaneously facing 10, maybe 20 men in physical combat. Or Hero, the Chinese wuxia movie released 10 years later, in which he stars as an assassin dueling in acrobatic sword fights. Take Hard Boiled, the 1992 Hong Kong film in which Leung plays an undercover cop battling in a hospital shootout with explosions galore. It takes just a quick glance at Leung’s extensive portfolio, spanning four decades, to see what he’s talking about. “Luckily, I did a lot of action movies before in my acting career, so it was not too difficult.” “It ended up that I had to do a lot of fight scenes,” Leung says. It’s noon in Hong Kong as we speak over Zoom, a few days ahead of Shang-Chi’s theatrical release on Sept. The corners of his eyes crinkle in a smile as he lifts up both forearms, where his character, Wenwu, would wear the 10 all-powerful bands that lend him supernatural strength and immortality. “I asked him, ‘Do I have to fight?’ He said, ‘No, you don’t have to fight, you have the rings so they would do all the CGI,’” Leung recalls. Leung had brought up hand-to-hand combat in an early meeting with director Destin Daniel Cretton. In Marvel’s latest superhero film, the acclaimed Hong Kong star moves with ferocity and agility, swiftly dealing blows to his opponents in one artfully choreographed spar after the next. You wouldn’t be able to tell from watching Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings that Tony Leung took just two weeks to prepare for his fight scenes.
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