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Everything Everywhere All At Once Was Written For Jackie Chan Before Michelle Yeoh Bagged The Role
Michelle Yeoh led the anticipated sci-fi film Everything Everywhere All At Once reportedly was first written for a male action hero.
Michelle Yeoh led the anticipated sci-fi film Everything Everywhere All At Once reportedly was first written for a male action hero. The film's directors Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan recently told The Hollywood Reporter that the film's leading role was originally written for martial arts star Jackie Chan.
Everything Everywhere All At Once follows Michelle Yeoh as Evelyn - a laundromat owner who's enlisted to save reality itself. Scheinert revealed that action film was "going to star a dude", Kwan added, "We were having trouble figuring out the casting for the father figure."
The filmmakers also confessed that Michelle Yeoh was originally cast as the main character's wife, but the makers believed turning her the protagonist will make the story more relatable. Kwan said, "And one of us started wondering what happens if we take Michelle's character and flip it and she becomes the protagonist. And the film just opened up in a completely different way."
"We have these very strong moms and grandmoms, and we're also both kind of dopey, gentle guys ourselves," Scheinert said as soon as they switched it they believed the characters and their dynamics had become much more relatable. "Why on earth didn't we write it this way from the get-go?'" he added.
However, they could no longer cast Jackie Chan in the husband's role. Kwan told Vulture how he eventually decided to recast the role. "The hardest thing about finding this role was that it required a lot of different skill sets. He had to be able to speak Cantonese, Mandarin, English. He had to know martial arts. But he also had to be an incredibly believable sappy pushover."
He then came across a picture of actor Ke Quan as Short Round from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. It was then he began thinking about casting Ke Quan as the ever-cheerful husband, Waymond.
