Michelle Yeoh on Aung San Suu Kyi

First published on 13 Apr 2012. Updated on 17 Apr 2012.

As she swivels on her make-up stool while elegantly attired in a leggy champagne one-piece, Michelle Yeoh hardly resembles a kung fu movie star. She bubbles with an exuberant air, laughs in a way that shakes her tiny frame and, perhaps most strikingly of all, even at the age of 49, radiates a youthful grace – all characteristics that suggest ‘beauty queen’ far more than ‘stunt starlet’.

It was decades ago that the Malaysian-born actress was first branded with the ‘action girl’ tag. She’s since been labelled as ‘Hong Kong’s Martial Arts Mistress’ and even ‘Asia’s Queen of Action’. Indeed, her breakout movies, from 1992’s Police Story 3 to The Heroic Trio and Yuen Woo-ping’s Tai Chi Master, all possessed a combative twist; and the films that propelled her to global fame – her motorcycling Bond Girl role in Tomorrow Never Dies and Ang Lee’s elegant, wildly acclaimed Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon – followed a distinctly ‘physical’ path. Yet in recent years, Yeoh has taken on more expansive, diverse roles outside the asskicking genre and, somewhat ironically, her latest role – easily the most important of her career – is about as non-violent as it gets.

In Luc Besson’s The Lady, Yeoh portrays Aung San Suu Kyi, the revered Burmese Nobel Peace Prize-winning freedom fighter who has led the non-violent opposition against Burma’s military junta. Yeoh has described this as the role of a lifetime. 

In her first in-depth interview since the movie’s world premiere screening, the actress talks exclusively with Time Out about being deported from Burma and living, breathing (and then finally meeting) The Lady herself.
 

Congratulations on The Lady. We heard you’ve been working on this role for years – how does it feel to finally have the movie out there?
Sometimes, having a film out there is a little daunting. It depends on what kind of a movie it is. If it’s The Mummy 3 or Kung Fu Panda 2, you know it’s a fun movie. But this time, with The Lady, I’m much more nervous, very very nervous. I always put my best into all the films that I do. But this time, it’s become more than just a movie.
 

In what way? 
You put a lot of pressure on yourself because Daw Suu is such an iconic figure, because of what she represents and how she has over the years carried herself. A lot of the time she was completely isolated. So you feel that, not just for her, not just for the people of Burma, also for anybody who believes that we should have freedom and the basic human rights. It sort of overwhelms you and you feel very humble. I think I’ve learnt a lot of things along the way about strength, about selflessness, about love. I think when you come into a movie like that, you feel like you’ve taken so much from it that you hope the audience would love the experience or get just as much as you have.
 

Spending so many years working on this role, how emotional was playing Daw Suu?
Oooh... I think it’s because of the emotional rollercoaster ride that she had to go through. Her journey was drawn out over 10 years, but when we filmed in Thailand, we had to do it over two and a half months. So it’s many years of very intense emotions – whether it was very happy moments to very sad, grief stricken moments. You had to really feel it before you can express it and be able to change over the periods of time. So it wasn’t easy. The camera doesn’t lie and that’s the trickiest part for us. You can only see the real vulnerability if you feel it.
 

How did you get to that stage? 
Just doing it. Really, there’s no two ways about it. Before I even opened my eyes, I could hear myself speaking in Burmese. It has to be so ingrained in you, that it seemed that you are instinctively doing that. That you naturally would speak like this or behave like that, and the only way you can do that is to constantly do your research. I would watch her I don’t know how many hours a day. Read the books she would read, so you have an understanding of where she’s coming from. It’s one thing trying looking like her, with hair and great makeup and a little bit of prosthetics, but you can only do a pose, you can only mimic the gestures. At the end of the day, to be able to say the lines and for you to believe that it was her that was telling you all this, the only way to do it is to try to understand and go behind all that.
 

Before the filming, did you have any contact with Daw Suu?
Absolutely none. She was under house arrest at the time. But we had her blessing and managed to get a message in – I don’t know how. And she knew we were going to film it, [yet] I don’t think any of us would have wanted to expose her life. You did eventually meet her, just after she was released from house arrest late last year. Tell us about that meeting.When I first met her, you stand there and you go, wow. You are thinking ‘I’m going to meet her. What am I going to say and how am I going to say it?’ I’ve been living with this person for four or five years, with her every day. Every morning when I wake up, the first thing I do is listen to her voice, read her speech, read the books that she reads. And then I turn around and she was just standing there. You know when you are going to meet the biggest fan of yours, and you know how they must feel like [hits chest, mimicking heart beating]. And all she did was [gestures a hug]. I had spoken to her a few times before and she just gave me the biggest hug. You feel like, I know this person and she feels like she knows me.
 

What does one do when meeting Daw Suu? 
We just sat and talked and she was telling us how she was so busy. Since her release from house arrest, everybody wanted to see her. She hadn’t had any contact with anybody in the last 10 years. She hadn’t seen Kim [her son] in 10 years, before they put her under house arrest again. She said ‘I’m so sorry, my place is such a mess. There is a cat here somewhere’. Someone had given her a cat as a gift and she said, ‘I literally don’t know what to do with this $6,000 cat.’ He was hiding in her bookshelf. She was surrounded by books and you feel that these have been her companions in the times that she had been by herself.

So you met her in the house?
Yes. And it was very surreal because we had built the house to scale. Luc [Besson, the director] and his team, from photographs and from Google Earth, they measured every detail. And then when you walk into the house, you think ‘how come her curtains are red. They’re not supposed to be’. But then you go ‘Oh my God, this is her place, this is not my place’.
 

What first attracted you to this role, this movie?
It was the love story that first moved me. Because with the political thing, what I thought most was ‘how does someone be so strong and be so filled with conviction’, because you take on the hopes of millions of people onto your shoulders. And the thing was, they were very happy if she left and the door was always open for her to say ‘I can’t take this any more, I need to get out of here’. But this whole family made the choice that this was the thing to do.

 

I understand you met her once with her son, Kim, and it was one of their first reunions. That must have been very interesting...
Of course. It was nice. I met Kim. The first thing he said, I will never forget is ‘May May is a lot slimmer than you’. [Laughs]

 

Really? 
Yes. The first words that came out of his mouth. And the good thing is he loves action movies, so he knows who I am. I was thinking ‘it’s true.’ We had thousands of photographs of her and I would have them all on the wall, I could see her, the way she smiled, and she is very slight. I lost about 8kg to play her. And it was a lot because I’m about 47kg at best. So going down to that, I was shockingly thin. Of course, she had a hunger strike, so it was perfect. 

 

You saw her right after she was released from house arrest in 2010. What kind of spirit was she in?
During house arrest, she had the barest of things. So she wasn’t in perfect health. But you feel a great inner strength. You feel that she is ready to meet the world and that she’s prepared for everything and anything that’s thrown her way. She’s very together and you feel a great sense of calm but energy.

 

After this intense role, do you feel inextricably linked to her now?
I don’t think I will ever be able to depart from that. Normally, after a role, you always have to know that when you walk into a character, you have to step back out. So when I did Memoirs of a Geisha, you walk into that world and you live that, and then afterwards it’s like a beautiful kimono and you fold it up and put it back in a box. It will always stay with you but it’s not you. But with this one, because the nature of the character is so different, you can learn so much to be a better person, there are many things that I will always try and keep, because it’s very inspiring.
 

By the time you met Daw Suu, you’d almost finished the movie. We heard about your deportation from Burma earlier this year, but how did you get into the country the first time?
I think when I was the only one who had the visa and was allowed to go, everybody was a little worried. The whole set – Luc, Virginie [Besson-Silla, one of the producers], all the French, everyone, had their visas rejected. They basically said no. Then we went back and Virginie said ‘everyone is rejected except for you’. We checked with the embassy in Thailand and then I asked my family to check with the embassy in Malaysia again, just to make sure and they said ‘no problem. You can go’. So Luc was the cutest. [Laughs] He said ‘maybe you should go next weekend, because next week we still have some scenes that you still need to do first, and then the week after that, in case you get delayed, we can always do that back in Paris’. And I’m thinking ‘you’re thinking I will get delayed or detained!?’
 

That’s quite prophetic, considering what happened to you later. Tell us what happened to you at the Burmese border earlier this June.
I got there. I had been there before and I loved the country. The people are so beautiful and the place is truly magnificent. We had already planned where we wanted to go, and Luc and Virginie had their visas, so we were all going to go and be one big happy family. In hindsight, a lot of my friends were very worried.
 

Why?
The first time when I went to see Daw Suu, there was no news that we were making the film. A lot of the people thought that we hadn’t even started and that we were thinking about making the film. I remember when I was leaving I bumped into a lot of reporters that immediately reported that I was there to see Daw Suu, we were going to make a movie together – and I was thinking ‘huh? No.’ This is the information they were spinning out. So everybody knew I was going to Burma and that we were making the film. In Thailand, it was front page that we had been filming there.

 

But the second time you went, filming had finished.
Yes, it was completely finished. Maybe I was just too foolish and naïve to think they would let me in. Honestly, [before that], I was like ‘yes, they’re ready for dialogue. They don’t have a problem with this. This actress is making a movie about our country and it’s about a past, it’s about a historical time and it’s not now’. We’re not talking about now, we’re talking about something that happened a long time ago.
 

So you went back…
So, in my naivety, I went back. I get off the plane, I march in and I’m happy. The girl was like ‘can I take a picture of you?’ because she was a fan. But then an officer came and I asked him ‘can I help you with anything?’ He said, ‘no no no’. And the next thing I know, that turned into ‘no, no, no, no, no’ 
[you can’t come in]. They just said I’m sorry, no explanations. 

 

How did you react? 
I was like ‘oh come on’. There’s no reason for you not to let me in – I said I’m a very sweet person [Laughs]. They were actually very sweet. And then they escorted me out, back onto Thai Airways, and I was in the same chair.

 

Will you go back again?
I will keep trying. I hope that one day very soon, they will relax. None of us have any inclinations to say anything bad about them. We were just asking for things that any human being would ask for, like why are you keeping 2,000-odd political prisoners still in prison, with the elections over, to show a gesture of real goodwill and that you’re ready to have dialogue and talk and make sure that your country becomes better, nobody wants harm to come to anyone.

 

Do you have plans to return?
Oh yes. Yes.
 

When?
I don’t know. I had better not tell you.

Presumably the movie will be banned in Burma. 
Presumably! [Laughs]

 

What do you hope the film does for Burma’s situation?
Right now, I think the more people that see it, the more talk there will be about it.

 

The Lady screens from April 19