International action star and heartthrob Chow Yun-Fat, who plays
the pirate lord Captain Sao Feng in
Pirates of the Caribbean:
At World's End, says he'd like to snag a leading-man role in a
Hollywood drama or romance but is getting lost in translation.
Chow, whose acting range and stature in Asia have been compared
with that of Robert De Niro, voiced frustration at racial barriers
that persist in America's movie industry. "Honestly, I prefer (to
do) more dramas. In American society ... Asian actors are not
accepted as leading men," he said in an interview last week for the
Pirates publicity tour. "Maybe we have to wait for a few
more years."
"Pirates" director Gore Verbinski said that as soon as the
writers decided the plot would take the film to Singapore, he knew
he would try to cast Chow. "Once we knew that, there was nobody
else," Verbinski said. "Yun-Fat is a living legend."
The 51-year-old Hong Kong actor is known to Asian audiences as a
cross between Cary Grant and James Bond, but in Hollywood he has
had trouble moving beyond the period films like Anna and the
King and martial arts fare like Crouching Tiger, Hidden
Dragon that US audiences know best. "He has experienced a
glass ceiling in Hollywood," said filmmaker Jeff Adachi, who
explored the topic in his PBS documentary The Slanted
Screen.
?"The tragedy is that there are roles that should be
offered to Asian leading men but people are not used to seeing that
... so it's something that studios are not willing to invest in,"
Adachi said.
SILENT FILM PHENOMENON
The first Asian actor to achieve stardom rivaling that of
Caucasian actors in US films was Japanese actor Sessue Hayakawa,
who became a silent film phenomenon after his turn as a merchant
who extorts a white woman to have an affair with him, then brands
her when she tries to leave him, in Cecil B. DeMille's The
Cheat in 1915.
The role propelled Hayakawa to silent film superstardom, and saw
him playing romantic leads frequently opposite white actresses,
said Stephen Gong, executive director of the Center for Asian
American Media in San Francisco.
"The amazing thing that happened is that suddenly Hayakawa
overnight became a huge star and his fan base was American women,"
Gong said. "They didn't know what to make of him."
Hawaiian-born actor James Shigeta also broke the racial barrier
in the late 1950s and 1960 with leading roles including "Bridge to
the Sun," opposite Carroll Baker and the 1961 musical Flower
Drum Song.
But those roles have been less plentiful than "Yellow Peril"
villain roles, such as Ming the Merciless from "Flash Gordon,"
"asexual beings" like the comic character Long Duk Dong from
"Sixteen Candles," or martial arts roles made popular by Hong Kong
imports Jackie Chan and Jet Li, Adachi said.
Film historian David Thomson said that while Chow has a shot at
landing dramatic roles of the type popularized by action star
Harrison Ford, he still faces an uphill struggle for romantic
leads.
"We break down these barriers very slowly and I don't think we
are doing we are doing it quickly enough to encourage an actor like
Chow to think he will get away with it," Thomson said. "I think
there is a great deal of racism in the country too."
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(Agencies via CRI.cn May 24, 2007)
