Tony Leung always makes a strong impression, but he’s never gotten a chance to make that impression in a big Hollywood movie before Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. It’s a departure for the Hong Kong actor, but only up to a point. Leung plays a superpowered immortal named Wenwu, and while the star fits right into the mix of martial arts and special effects in the film’s action scenes, it’s the vulnerability he brings to the quieter scenes that capture Leung at his best. Wenwu is the eponymous hero’s father and a bad guy whose agenda threatens the existence of the world — it’s a Marvel movie after all — but also a man haunted by personal loss and his failings as a parent. He’s a villain more prone to furrow his brow in concern than sneer in contempt. You don’t hire Leung to play uncomplicated characters, bad guys or otherwise.
Leung has been a star for decades in Asia and in arthouses across the globe. He began his career on television and enjoyed a second career in music, but it was in films that he found his richest opportunities. Leung’s ascent coincided with the golden age of Hong Kong of filmmaking in the ’80s and ’90s, allowing him to collaborate with directors like John Woo, Andrew Lau and, most significantly, Wong Kar-Wai, with whom he’s made seven films. Though no longer working at the frenetic pace that defined his 1990s — Leung appeared in nine films released in 1993 alone — he stayed busy in the ’00s and ’10s and will likely be as in-demand as ever after Shang-Chi.
There’s a good chance, however, that Shang-Chi will double as an introduction to Leung for many viewers. For them, and for Leung fans who might be inspired to fill in some gaps, here are some of his most memorable roles.
Hard Boiled (1992)
One of the great failings of the streaming era is that so many films from the height of the Hong Kong film boom have become nearly impossible to find in the West. That includes the Hong Kong classics of John Woo, who helped redefine the action film with a combination of high emotion, operatic clashes between good and evil, and stylized fight scenes that built on the work of Martin Scorsese, Sam Peckinpah, and others. Leung and Woo first collaborated on the 1990 war movie Bullet in the Head, a punishingly violent box office flop that’s since undergone a critical reappraisal. They found greater success with Hard Boiled, Woo’s farewell to Hong Kong before setting off for Hollywood. It plays like the work of a director trying out every action movie trick he can think of, but the performances help give it considerable emotional weight. Starring opposite Woo regular Chow Yun-Fat, Leung plays Alan, a triad assassin who’s actually a Hong Kong cop working deep undercover. To capture the mix of violence, mournfulness, and existential dread, Leung drew on the work of French actor Alain Delon, whose movies he’d go see with his mother as a child.
Ashes of Time (1994)
Leung’s collaboration with Wong began with a minor role in the director’s second film, 1990’s Days of Being Wild. Ashes of Time, Wong’s venture into the wuxia genre, is filled with all the costumes, period settings, and martial artistry the genre demands, but it’s also very much a Wong Kar-Wai film — a dreamy, moody experience in which narrative often takes a back seat to atmosphere. Playing the part of the Blind Swordsman, a character from the famed novel The Legend of the Condor Horses (to which the film serves as a prequel), Leung is just one member of a parade of Hong Kong stars that includes Maggie Cheung, Leung’s future wife Carina Lau, Brigitte Lin, Leslie Cheung, and the similarly named Tony Leung Ka-Fai, with whom he’s co-starred in several films. A troubled production, the film’s often hard to follow, but it’s gorgeous and sensuously overwhelming anyway.
Chungking Express (1994)
Wong and Leung’s next film cemented their partnership. Made during a shutdown in the production of Ashes of Time, its spontaneity, improvisational spirit, and contemporary energy stand in stark contrast to that film. Telling two stories of heartbreak, missed connections, and young love, Leung stars in the film’s second half as a policeman recovering from a break-up with a flight attendant who attracts the attention of an eccentric food stand employee (Faye Wong). Leung didn’t have any plans to appear in the movie until a phone call from Wong, but his sad-eyed presence brings an extraordinary romantic intensity. If the ability to convey more with a look than words makes a movie star, this film confirms Leung as one of the greats.
Happy Together (1997)
Wong and Leung next reunited for a more tortured love story in which Leung plays Lai Yiu-Fai, one half of a gay couple that falls apart then reunites then falls apart again during a visit to Argentina. Leslie Cheung plays his partner and, with Wong, they summon the sense of exhaustion and despair that defines a failing relationship, one interrupted by the occasional burst of overwhelming beauty and a faint but insistent sense of hope that there might be a way out, for at least one half of the couple.
Flowers of Shanghai (1998)
Venturing away from Hong Kong, Leung plays a key role in Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-hsien’s drama about life in Shanghai’s late-19th century “flower houses,” home to elite courtesans who live a gilded cage existence somewhere between luxury and slavery. Leung portrays the gentle-seeming Mr. Wang, who gets entangled between two “flower girls”: Crimson (Michiko Hada), to whom he’s become an exclusive patron and possibly a marital prospect, and Jasmin (Vicky Wei), a rival who’s caught his attention. Though he directs in a much more studied, disciplined style, Hou is as much a sensualist as Wong and his long takes capture an enticing world of feasts, late-night drinking games, and opium, one so joyous and devoted to pleasure on the surface that it’s possible to miss the rottenness on which it’s built. Leung plays Wong as a man drawn in by the illusion of pleasure who learns the consequences of lingering within it too long.
In the Mood for Love (2000) / 2046 (2004)
Leung’s next film for Wong explored a different sort of difficult romance in the ’60s Hong Kong of both men’s childhoods. Leung plays Chow Mo-wan, a journalist who lives next door to Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung), a secretary. They befriend one another then come to realize that their respective spouses might be having an affair, leaving them to decide whether or not to act on their own growing feelings. Together Cheung, Leng, and Wong create a film filled with bittersweet yearning — for impossible love and for the irretrievable past. They’d reunite for 2004’s 2046, a sort-of sequel in which Chow returns to Hong Kong and becomes the center of other tales of heartbreak that serve as fodder for his own attempt to write a science fiction story (which Wong also dramatizes). Thematically, it’s a natural (and spellbinding) extension of In the Mood for Love, but anyone expecting more of the same will leave baffled.
Infernal Affairs (2002)
Returning to the world of crime, conflicting loyalties and tortured double lives, Leung stars in a police thriller co-directed by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak as Chan Wing-yan, a cop working deep undercover in a vicious triad operation. Andy Lau (different guy from the director) co-stars as Lau Kin-ming, a triad operative who’s wormed his way deep into the police force. If that set-up sounds familiar, that’s because Martin Scorsese remade it as The Departed a few years later, but the tension and weighty themes found in Scorsese’s film were there in the original as well.
Hero (2002)
After establishing himself as one of the great dramatists of the ’80s and ’90s with films like Raise the Red Lantern, Zhang Yimou reinvented himself as a director of stunning wuxia action in the ’00s, starting with this slippery, colorful story of Nameless (Jet Li), an assassin who regales a king with tales of destroying the other assassins sent to kill him. Joined by Zhang Ziyi, and Donie Yen, Leung plays the soulful Broken Sword, who’s distracted from his mission to kill by his failing relationship with Snow (Maggie Cheung, again).
Lust, Caution (2007)
Shang-Chi isn’t the first time Leung played the villain. Set against the backdrop of Japan’s occupation of China during the Second Sino-Japanese War, Ang Lee’s spy drama casts him as Mr. Yee, a powerful agent within the puppet government running China. Yee becomes the target of an assassination attempt by a group of Hong Kong college students-turned-resistance fighters whose ranks include Wong Chia Chi (Tang Wei), who attempts to seduce him in spite of her sexual inexperience. A sometimes violent affair follows, one Lee depicts with a frankness that earned the film an NC-17 rating in the U.S. and led to Tang being effectively banned from the Chinese film industry for several years. For Leung, the film offered a chance to show the dark side of the obsessive romantics he played for Wong, letting desire tip over into a need to control others, and worse.
The Grandmaster (2013)
In his most recent film for Wong, Leung plays Ip Man, the martial arts master who trained Bruce Lee. Leung learned kung fu for the role at the age of 47 and while Wong brings his own swooping flair to the Yuen Woo-ping choreographed fight scenes — one rain-soaked battle is an all-timer — this is less a departure from Wong and Leung’s past work than it might sound. It’s an action film, sure, but also another yearning, bittersweet journey through the past that works in large part because of Leung’s intensity and commitment, qualities he brings with him wherever he goes, even universes filled with superheroes and CGI dragons.