We’ve seen Yeo Yann Yann played mothers before — parental figures who are tortured, estranged, struggling. You name it, she’s done it. But one packing heat — a lot of heat? Now, that’s something new.
In the Netflix action thriller Havoc — directed by Gareth Evans (The Raid, Gangs of London) — Tom Hardy plays a cop with a tainted reputation racing against time to stop a drug deal-gone-south from escalating into an all-out gang war. Yeo co-stars as triad leader Clarice Fong, whose son was killed in said botched exchange.
Speaking to 8days.sg over Zoom a few days before the movie’s London premiere, the Singapore-based Malaysian, 48, says she tapped into her character’s psyche “as a grieving mother”. “[The moment] she steps out her private jet, she is still processing [the news of her son’s death] and she is angry, and the first thing she does is to kill someone.”
While Clarice is no jovial character, working on the Havoc set in South Wales, however, was a blast, literally. “Gun training was fun,” Yeo says. On weekends, she and her cast-mates — including Singaporean actor/action choreographer and “old friend” Sunny Pang — would “go out for dim sum, watch a movie or have dinner together”.
Elsewhere, she was starstruck by Forest Whitaker, with whom she shared a few scenes together. “You cannot imagine how excited I was when I found out that I was going to have scenes with him,” the two-time Golden Horse Award winner recalls. “And when I saw him the first time, I was a little embarrassed,” she says. “I held his hand and I said, ‘Can I hold your hand?’ I just want to make sure he’s real.”
What about Hardy? “He was extremely busy,” she says. “If I’m not wrong, he was also busy doing publicity for another film.”
Havoc is Yeo’s second Hollywood effort; her first was the Disney+ fantasy series American Born Chinese. (Fun fact: Havoc was filmed in July 2021 while American Born Chinese was February 2022.) She savoured her time working overseas: “For Asian actors, it’s an opportunity to see what it’s like to work in a different environment and culture.” She adds, “[It’s also a chance] to make new friends.”
Yeo had so much fun breaking bad on screen that I jump in to pitch her a team-up with her fellow Malaysian and American Born Chinese alum Michelle Yeoh: a prequel exploring the origins of Yeo’s Havoc character as well as Yeoh’s crime boss in the short-lived The Brothers Sun.
Yeo’s face lights up: “That’ll be fun!”
And let’s call it The Gangster Sisters, I propose. Nah. Yeo has a better title: The Killer Sisters.
Netflix, you reading this?