12/15/2023 0 Comments Liang shen youth with you![]() ![]() And in stark contrast there are these other Asians in the news for getting beat up and killed,” Liu says. “Here we are getting to talk about our show, which is this fabulous, wonderful, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. The 33-year-old actor talks about the strange experience of participating in recent activities promoting Kung Fu. In Kung Fu, Liu, who is Hakka Chinese and grew up in New York, plays Henry Yan, a Chinese art history graduate student and Nicky’s new love interest. “I’ve had a lot of mixed feelings over the past few weeks-this strange survivor’s remorse, this weird imposter syndrome,” Eddie Liu tells TIME. Why has it gotten worse?” Members of the Kung Fu cast including Ma later shared personal experiences of facing discrimination and racism in a #StopAsianHate video. Tzi Ma had posted a video at the start of the pandemic, in March of 2020, to address the growing number of attacks against the AAPI community-after the actor himself was told, “You should be quarantined.” Following the Atlanta-area shootings on March 16 that took the lives of eight people, including six women of Asian descent, Ma reposted the video saying: “Exactly 1 year today, I sent a message. In the lead-up to the show’s debut, members of its cast have repeatedly spoken out against anti-Asian violence. Kung Fu’s release coincides with a national reckoning with anti-Asian racism, as the number of hate incidents against Asian Americans surged in the past year. Representation as one ‘long-term solution’ to combat anti-Asian violence A 2018 biography- Bruce Lee: A Life by Matthew Polly- asserts that the 1972 series originated from a file that Ed Spielman had submitted in 1969 with Howard Friedlander, and Spielman said in 1974 that 10 years of his research led to the creation of Kung Fu. “The studio contacted him and he was soon deeply involved, offering numerous ideas, many of which were eventually incorporated in the resulting TV success, Kung Fu,” she wrote. But even that iconic Chinese-American character was never popular in films until he was played by Warner Oland, who was not only Caucasian, he was Swedish, for chrissake.”Īfter Lee died in 1973 shortly before the release of Enter the Dragon, his wife Linda wrote in her memoir Bruce Lee: The Only Man I Knew that he had conceptualized the story of a Shaolin kung fu master traversing America and pitched it to Warner Bros. “In the history of Hollywood there had never been an Asian hero-unless you count Charlie Chan. Weintraub, who later produced the 1973 film Enter the Dragon starring Lee, expressed his frustration at Kuhn’s words being “right.” “The powers that be had a hundred different reasons why Bruce was wrong for the part: he was an unknown, he was short, his English wasn’t good enough, he lacked the necessary serenity to play the role… But at the end of the day, there was really only one reason,” he wrote. But getting him the lead is still going to be a long shot. Weintraub recounted Kuhn’s reaction: “‘He’s amazing,’ Tom gushed. In the audition, Lee gave Kuhn a stunning demonstration with nunchucks. “I was as enthusiastic as ever to put Bruce into the role of Kwai Chang Caine,” Weintraub wrote, and described sending Lee to Tom Kuhn, who was the Head of Television Programming at Warner Bros. when the first Kung Fu was being made, recounted Lee’s audition and the response to it in his 2011 memoir- Bruce Lee, Woodstock And Me: From The Man Behind A Half-Century of Music, Movies and Martial Arts. “And for myself as a woman, I really wanted a strong female Asian lead who was kicking butt and was the role model that I wished I had growing up on TV.”įred Weintraub, who was an executive at Warner Bros. And for me, in developing the show, it was really important that we change that,” Kim said. But she also acknowledged the elements she wanted to alter. At a media event last month, Kim said that the original series was groundbreaking for its introduction of kung fu to a U.S. The modern-day adaptation of Kung Fu is helmed by television writer Christina M. In recent years, a pattern of white actors cast as Asian characters in particular-from Tilda Swinton as the Ancient One in Doctor Strange to Scarlett Johansson as Major Motoko Kusanagi in the live-action adaptation of Ghost in the Shell-has sparked outcry for change. The new adaptation arrives at a time when calls for an end to Hollywood’s whitewashing of roles have gotten louder. ![]() The makeup of the cast carries extra weight given that Kung Fu is a reimagining of the 1972 television show of the same name by Ed Spielman, which followed the story of the half-Chinese, half-white Shaolin monk Kwai Chang Caine, played by David Carradine, a white actor. ![]()
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