SHANG-CHI AND THE LEGEND OF THE TEN RINGS
He’s a comic-book character so obscure that even the director and star of his new movie hadn’t heard of him. Yet SHANG-CHI AND THE LEGEND OF THE TEN RINGS is ushering in a bold new era at Marvel, with the first Asian-american superhero and “bananas” spect
Director Destin Daniel Cretton, producer Kevin Feige, and stars Simu Liu and Awkwafina spill the beans on Marvel’s first Asian-american hero.
SIMU LIU WILL NEVER FORGET THE FIRST time he played a superhero. It was a few years ago, back in his struggling-actor days, when he would take pretty much any gig that came his way, as long as it paid the bills. (He was also a stock-photo model for a while, as it happens.) On this particular occasion, he was dressing up as Spider-man for kids’ birthday parties. In some ways, it was fun — “I remember watching the Tobey Maguire Spider-man movies when I was 12 or 13 and really loving them,” he says — but it also came with a constant sobering awareness that if kids clamoured for Spidey to reveal the Peter Parker beneath the mask, Liu couldn’t comply. “As an Asian man, I could never show my face,” he says. “It was only once I put the mask on that the illusion of the superhero would be sold. The moment that I took it off, nobody would ever think I could be that. That’s something I was keenly aware of.”
A few years later, not much had changed. The Marvel Cinematic Universe was only nine films old at that point, but those films had been written and directed by white guys, and starred white guys. As for Asian or Asian-american characters, Kenneth Choi and Tadanobu Asano in minor supporting roles was just about as good as it got. “I was very keenly aware that my face was not being represented,” says Liu. And so one night in July of 2014, Liu fired up his Twitter (@simuliu — he’s an excellent follow), wrote the following, and pressed ‘send’: “Hey @Marvel, great job withCpt America and Thor. Now how about an Asian American hero?”
Five years later, almost to the day, Liu returned to that tweet to add a reply. It simply read, “LOL.”
Because Liu had just been announced as the eponymous star of Marvel’s Shang-chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings, and the first Asianamerican title character in the MCU. In short, his second stint as a superhero was about to become a whole lot more interesting than his first. And this time, without a mask in sight.
AROUND A YEAR AFTER LIU SENT THAT first tweet, the post-credits sting of Ant-man saw Michael Douglas’ Hank Pym take his daughter, Hope (Evangeline Lilly), to a secret compartment where he reveals he’s been keeping a Wasp costume just for her. Surveying it with barely disguised glee, Hope says, “About damn time.” And since that point, there has been a sense of About Damn Timeliness to much of what Marvel has done, both in front of and behind the camera. Black Panther became the first MCU film to focus on a Black hero, while Ryan Coogler became the franchise’s first Black director. Captain Marvel and the addition of “The Wasp” to the title of the Ant-man sequel were forward steps in representation of female heroes. While Taika Waititi, Cate Shortland, Anna
Boden, Malcolm Spellman, Jac Schaeffer, Kate Herron, Kari Skogland and Chloé Zhao have all stepped up behind the camera on both films and Disney+ shows.
But when it came to Asian characters, the MCU’S track record is still spotty at best. Jacob Batalon was great as Ned in the Spider-man movies, but he was still very much the Guy In The Chair. And while Benedict Wong had made an impact as Doctor Strange’s fellow sorcerer Wong, the focus was still on the rich surgeon from New York. On the small screen, shows like Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Iron Fist made greater strides, but those don’t even seem to be part of the MCU canon anymore. In short, representation has been lacking. Supporting room only.
Shang-chi is very clearly an attempt to remedy that, and a laudable one, and while it doesn’t redress the balance overnight, there’s no doubting the significance of this character, and this film. “It’s very important,” says Destin Daniel Cretton, the film’s co-writer and director. “The only reason I’m doing this project is because
I feel really proud of the character that we’re introducing to the world.”
Cretton, like many of the directors Marvel has worked with in the last few years, comes to the blockbuster arena with an indie background rich in character studies like Short Term 12.
“I saw the announcement that they were doing their first Asian-american superhero in the MCU,” he says. “And up until that point I honestly wasn’t wanting to do a big superhero movie. But when I read that announcement, the little kid in me came alive. It wasn’t until that moment that I fully realised there was that vacuum in my life when I was a kid.” Cretton, who was born and raised in Hawaii, knew what he wanted to do with Shang-chi, a character whose affinity for martial arts has earned him the nickname ‘The Master of Kung Fu’. “I grew up with Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan and Jet Li,” says Cretton. “But I haven’t seen a hero on screen that really walks and talks like me, dresses like me, listens to the music that me and my friends listen to; somebody truly Asian-american. And that was what was really exciting to me, to create something that just shows the Asian-american experience through the eyes of a budding superhero.”
So Shang-chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings begins with Shang-chi in America, where he’s been living in secret for the last decade or so, after leaving China and walking away from a dark and dangerous legacy. When that past catches up with him, he and his friend Katy (Awkwafina) have to set off on a dangerous journey around the world — the kind of journey that necessitates much kicking and punching of the various obstacles that insert themselves in the way. Which meant that when it came to finding an actor to play the role, Cretton and co were looking for someone who was Asian-american,
athletic, charming, and believable in the role. “We didn’t have anybody specifically in mind,” says Cretton. “We had to do a search, and Simu rose to the top because of his ability to act. We weren’t going into it looking for someone who can do a split kick. We were looking for someone who could humanise a superhero.”
In the end, they didn’t find Liu because he’d tweeted them asking for a job — if getting a job at Marvel was that easy, we’d all work there — but via Sarah Finn, the casting director behind many of the MCU’S most pivotal roles. At that point, Liu was no longer doing stock-model gigs or temping as Spider-man. He had a growing profile thanks to his role on Canadian-korean sitcom Kim’s Convenience (Liu was born in China, but raised in Canada). Over the course of two months, he juggled that show’s shooting schedule with auditioning for Shang-chi, from sending in a self-taped audition (featuring two scenes from Good Will Hunting) to meeting with Cretton, doing a chemistry test with Awkwafina, and a final screen test before he got that life-changing July call from Kevin Feige. Two days later, he was on stage in San Diego at Comic-con, being paraded to 6,500 screaming geeks in his immediate field of vision; and the world in his peripheral. “There was a moment where I was sitting at a table with Angelina Jolie [there for Eternals],” he recalls. “And that was a big, ‘Oh my God, I’m here,’ moment.”
After that began the hard work. The fight training, the physical preparation, and most of all, the character work, finding the heart and soul of Shang-chi. And if, during that process, Liu found himself asking the question, “Who is Shang-chi?”, he can take some solace from the fact that he wasn’t alone.
THERE’S A COMMON THREAD THAT LINKS every member of the Shang-chi creative team that Empire speaks to. None of them had a clue who Shang-chi was before the movie came their way. “I didn’t know specifically of the Shang-chi world, but I think I did know kind of the history behind his lineage,” says Awkwafina, magnificently hedging her bets. “I was not familiar with the comics,” admits Cretton, while Liu — the man who is Shang-chi — is even happier to confess his ignorance. “I didn’t even know that he existed!” he laughs. “If I had to choose, I felt like the most prominent Asian superhero in the Marvel Universe was Sunfire [a Japanese member of the X-men]. But I honestly didn’t know about Shang-chi. He’s probably one of the more obscure characters in the universe.”
That’s being generous. Though Shang-chi has been around since 1973, when he was created by Steve Englehart and Jim Starlin at the height of the popularity of both Bruce Lee and the TV show Kung Fu, he’s never exactly been considered one of Marvel’s leading lights. Nevertheless, around 20 years ago, when a young producer named Kevin Feige and an early version of the brain trust that is now known as the Marvel Studios Parliament scribbled down a bunch of names of characters around whom they might be able to build the fledgling MCU, Shang-chi’s was on there. “I can’t remember how many titles were on there,” says Feige, now the President of Marvel Studios, “but 20 or so. So many of the titles we identified early on was with the hope that we could do all sorts of different films, starring all sorts of different types of people. And for the last five years, we’ve been actively working on bringing the film to life.”
Shang-chi is not the only name on that list that hasn’t become a movie (Feige won’t specify which others haven’t made it), but the fact that it’s taken nearly two decades and 25 MCU films to get to this point is far from ideal. Cynics might also be keen to spot a correlation between the public announcement of the Shang-chi movie, in December 2018, and the massive success of Black Panther earlier that year, and suggest that Marvel (and Disney) saw how the latter showed that diversity could pay dividends, and simply wanted to repeat the trick with Shang-chi and Asian audiences. Feige, however, rejects that notion. “I think it bolstered our confidence and our belief, but we were heading that way already,” he says. “I remember seeing a viral video when the Black Panther poster first came out. It was some young men in a movie theatre overwhelmed with excitement at seeing the poster, and it was moving because people were excited about the movie we were making. But it was also a harsh realisation that they were reacting that way because they had not seen it before. So Panther really coalesced the notion of, ‘Everybody deserves to see themselves portrayed in these larger-than-life ways.’”
He also saw it as an opportunity to make up for lost time within the MCU. On two notable occasions, Feige and his team had to wrestle with the depiction of Asian characters whose comic-book origins were problematic at best, and regrettably racist at worst, and ultimately
decided the better part of valour wasn’t just discretion but avoiding the subject entirely. One was the casting of Tilda Swinton as The Ancient One (usually portrayed as a wizened old Asian man) in Doctor Strange. The other, and perhaps most important, example came back in 2008, during the development of the cornerstone of the entire enterprise: Iron Man.
For some considerable time, that script was meant to have Tony Stark face off against his most famous foe, The Mandarin, a Chinese warlord whose depiction has bordered on the offensively stereotypical. Unable to crack that particular nut, Feige and director Jon Favreau instead sidestepped the character, retconning his power source — ten rings of extra-terrestrial origin and extraordinary power — into the name of a terrorist organisation that would prove to be an occasional thorn in Tony’s steel side. The Mandarin then showed up in Iron Man 3, played by Ben Kingsley. At least, so it seemed, until an audacious twist revealed that he was actually a drug-addled Scouse actor called Trevor, a sock puppet for the real villain of the piece. It remains the MCU’S funniest, most audacious twist, but it still came from a reluctance to properly tackle the Mandarin and his Chinese heritage.
“The Mandarin in Iron Man and The Ancient One came out of, ‘We don’t want to do it wrong,’” admits Feige. “We don’t want to inadvertently fall into stereotypes that we absolutely deplore, and therefore the idea was, ‘Let’s avoid it altogether.’ And the mindset obviously had to shift to, ‘Oh no, let’s not avoid it altogether — let’s focus on doing it correctly.’”
THAT IS PRECISELY THE NOTION THAT drives Shang-chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings, which takes advantage of the obscurity of Shang-chi to give him an entirely new origin. The dark legacy from which he’s running is one bequeathed to him by his father, who just happens to be the world’s greatest criminal, and who wants his son to follow in his footsteps. In the comics, Shang-chi’s dad is Fu Manchu (yes, that Fu Manchu), a character even more problematic than The Mandarin and one Marvel wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot bargepole even if their rights to the character hadn’t expired. So the obvious candidate to fill the void was The Mandarin, reimagined here as Wenwu, a mysterious and ancient gangster played by the mysterious and venerable Tony Leung, making his Hollywood debut. “Our version of the character is not The Mandarin in the way that people are expecting him to be,” says Dave Callaham, the film’s co-writer. “‘The Mandarin’ is a title that has been applied to him in the past by people that don’t understand his culture. But he’s a much deeper character than I think a lot of people would expect.”
Daddy issues have been a staple of the MCU since day one. Tony Stark’s are so big it took him an entire lifetime to come to terms with them.
Thor and Odin haven’t always seen eyes to eye. Peter Quill’s dad not only turned out to be a dick, but an actual planet. But the relationship and rift between Wenwu and Shang-chi promises to be something we haven’t seen before. “It was for me the part of the Shang-chi comics that I personally really connected to,” says Cretton, whose pitch to Feige began and ended with a picture of him with his own father. “It was really important for us to find the root of that anger and that pain. That was the goal from the get-go, and probably the number one fear of all of us was creating a Mandarin that was further contributing to the ‘Yellow Peril’ type of stereotypes that are still flying around.” They’re not the only fighters in the family — newcomer Meng’er Zhang (who had never been on a movie set before being cast) plays Xialing, Shang-chi’s sister, who also plays a vital part in the efforts to bring him home to face up to his destiny. “I think she is more like her father,” says Zhang. “She’s tough and confident outside, but there’s a fragile little girl deep down.”
For Liu, the relationship between Shang-chi and Wenwu is something that will resonate with everyone, but also feel very specific to Asian families. “My parents really had very specific expectations of me that were very different from what I actually ended up going into,” he says. “There’s definitely a big part of me that relates to that. Shang-chi is not with Wenwu at the beginning of the story, and something happens that folds him back into the world. It’s something rooted in love and care, just maybe expressed in not the best way. I think that’s such a relatable theme.”
The restoration of the real Mandarin (the groundwork for which was laid in Drew Pearce’s MCU One-shot, All Hail The King, in which Trevor Slattery is targeted by supporters of the one, true, and very pissed-off Mandarin) is just one swerve from the comics. Shang-chi may have been around for decades, but he doesn’t come with baggage, or a pantheon of classic arcs ready-made for transferring to the big screen. So that gave Cretton and Callaham a tremendous amount of leeway in pulling together their story. Which might explain why you can expect quasi-realistic dust-ups on public transport in San Francisco, intermingled with epic, fantastical battle scenes with vast crowds of characters and creatures. It’s why the fanfavourite character Fin Fang Foom — a giant dragon! From space! — appears to show up in the trailer. “It’s difficult to really see clearly what that is,” laughs Liu. “Could be the Loch Ness monster.” It’s why the trailer also features a cage fight between Wong from Doctor Strange and The Abomination, the scaly villain last seen in 2008’s The Incredible Hulk.
“This movie is bananas,” says Cretton with a chuckle and considerable understatement. “And by the end, you’re very much in the world of Marvel. The place we wanted it to go is not just a hand-to-handcombat kung-fu film. It is that, but it’s a Marvel movie, and by the end we see that Shang-chi can stand with the greats.”
When we’ll get to see Shang-chi stand shoulder-to-shoulder with some of those greats remains unclear. What seems clear is that we’ll be seeing Simu Liu in the role again. “I’m still going through that process of coming to terms with the fact that I’m in this movie universe now,” he says. “And I imagine it’ll hit me again when I do, potentially, another one or…” And for the first time, the incredibly articulate Liu stumbles, unsure of what he should say and even if he’s already said too much. In the end he settles for, “or whatever comes next”. Safe. Reliable. Smart.
But for him, and for all involved, Shang-chi’s continuing story, wherever it’s presented, is not the most important outcome of this film. “Visibility is a huge thing,” says Awkwafina. And now an entire generation will feel seen. “Growing up, Spider-man was my go-to because I could just imagine being Spider-man because of the mask,” Cretton remembers. “I could project myself into Spider-man very easily. But to be able to have a superhero for other Asian kids around the world, that they can project themselves into without having a mask, is pretty awesome.”
And, of course, this is just the beginning. “It feels like in this moment, a very necessary step for us all, collectively, to take,” says Liu. “And I feel great, but I’m only gonna be the first step in a long and meaningful movement.” He is the first. He won’t be the last.
So, if you happen to be at a children’s birthday party in the next few months and see a jobbing actor pretend to be Shang-chi, make a note of their name. You could be looking at the MCU’S next Next Big Thing.
SHANG-CHI AND THE LEGEND OF THE TEN RINGS IS IN CINEMAS FROM 3 SEPTEMBER