Michelle Yeoh has been performing her own stunts for most of her career, but a sequence on 1992’s Police Story 3: Supercop—released here in the States simply as Supercop in 1996—almost left the actress for dead.
“In Asia at that time, we don’t really do rehearsals, we don’t have weeks of preparation. We learn the stunt and we do it,” Yeoh tells Entertainment Weekly as part of her promo run for Everything Everywhere All At Once.
The sequence in question features Yeoh jumping from a moving truck into a droptop roadster driven by co-star Jackie Chan while both vehicles speed down a Malaysian highway. As Yeoh explains, the six-foot drop from the vehicles when they were moving was far more intimidating than when they were stationary and the actors were just setting up the shot.
Yeoh goes into detail about the first time they attempted the stunt which found Yeoh hitting the hood of Chan’s car and then hitting the ground. “The windscreen was supposed to shatter, and that would have helped me have a break,” she says. “But the windscreen didn’t shatter, I had nowhere to hold onto, and I kept sliding off the car.”
Yeoh hit the ground and thankfully came out unscathed. Chan was ready to call it quits for the day, but Yeoh convinced the film’s director, Stanley Tong, to let her have one more go at it.
Tong—who began his career as a stunt man before turning to directing—and Yeoh went way back, and according to Yeoh he “understands the level of who I am and what I can and am willing to do.”
“When you fall off a horse, you jump back, right on, right away,” explains Yeoh. And she got it right on the next take.
It is a truly spectacular stunt that needs to be seen to be believed. Quentin Tarantino praised Supercop as having “the greatest stunts ever filmed in any movie ever,” and per tradition in Jackie Chan films, the outtakes over the end credits of Supercop will find audiences impressed that everyone survived them.
Everything Everywhere All At Once featuring Yeoh will have a limited release March 25 followed by a wide release on April 8.