Star Trek: Discovery's Michelle Yeoh Named Time's 2022 Icon of the Year
Michelle Yeoh as Philippa Georgiou in STAR TREK: DISCOVERY. Image: Paramount+.
DECEMBER 8, 2022 - If you had suggested to Michelle Yeoh 45 years ago, that she’d be an actress and up for an Oscar, she’d probably have told you that you had no idea of what you were talking about. Her mind was made up, her course had been set. She was going to be a ballerina. But life, as it tends to do, threw her for a loop: a back injury when she was a teenager changed the course that her life would take.
However, showing the same indomitable spirit that has navigated her life, change she did. She created quite a career for herself in her native Hong Kong, but she later set her sights on the US and Hollywood. And success she found. The now 60-year-old Malaysian actor has battled Jet Li in The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, flung herself onto a moving car driven by Jackie Chan in Supercop, and jumped off a skyscraper with Pierce Brosnan’s James Bond in Tomorrow Never Dies. She had major roles in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Memoirs of a Geisha; and Crazy Rich Asians. She’s done Marvel, Star Trek, Kung Fu Panda, Minions—Avatar, Transformers, and The Witcher are next. But, until Everything Everywhere All at Once, which premiered in March, she had never been No. 1 on a Hollywood call sheet.
This, of course, was her choice. She made a conscientious decision to only accept movies that went against stereotypes. She didn’t want to be the Asian woman in the movie, she wanted to be the woman in the movie who happened to be Asian. These choices led to years between films, but with her integrity intact, here she is today, and Time Magazine has named her the 2022 Icon of the Year.
“OK,” she says, “Give it to me.” Yeoh has always been a woman who knows what she wants: to prove herself, to lend voice to fully embodied, fascinating characters, to play and to love, and to reach generations through the power of movies. Now she wants that Oscar—that validation for herself and for people around the world who look “like us, so we can experience what it feels like to be told we belong. It’s not about needing it, it’s that feeling that you don’t have to explain: it’s love from other people. My arms are out open.”
If you have some Time, follow the link to this and much, much more from Michelle Yeoh.
Thaddeus Tuffentsamer is an internationally selling author. His books have been sold in the US, the UK, Sweden, Germany, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, Italy, and France. He has a series of young reader novels, a satirical self-help book, (which, according to reviews, actually has some pretty solid counsel), and has joined the list of professional Sherlock Holmes authors.
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