Bruce Lee legacy lives again
Legend’s kung fu skills highlighted in “Warrior.”
Nearly 50 years after Bruce Lee’s death, the martial-arts legend’s TV passion project finally comes alive in bonecrushing, socially relevant style.
In Cinemax’s “Warrior,” premiering Friday (10 EDT/PDT), tumultuous racial struggles and two-fisted conflicts in San Francisco’s Chinatown, circa 1878, are seen through the eyes of immigrant Ah Sahm. The role, played by British actor Andrew Koji, is one Lee had conceived for himself in the late 1960s and early ’70s to showcase an Asian character in Western culture who authentically portrayed Lee’s martial-arts skills.
“Growing up as an Asian American, we’re lucky to have two sentences in a history book about the Chinese-American experience,” says Justin Lin, the series’ executive producer alongside the late icon’s daughter Shannon Lee and Jonathan Tropper (“Banshee”). “It’s a show about an American experience that hasn’t really been explored before.”
The historical and thematic bones of “Warrior” were included in an eightpage treatment left by Lee following his death in 1973. Shannon Lee says he wrote it around the time his TV show “The Green Hornet” was canceled and he faced difficulty finding roles in Hollywood. Ultimately, Bruce Lee left for Hong Kong to raise his profile before coming back to the U.S. for seminal kung fu film “Enter the Dragon” – released a month after he died at age 33.
Lee’s path mirrors that of Ah Sahm’s, at least in terms of their journey: The main character of “Warrior” comes to San Francisco in search of someone from his past and becomes embroiled in gang warfare between rival Chinese factions.
Ah Sahm and his Asian peers are hated by white dockworkers who don’t want new immigrants taking their jobs. And corrupt politicians, police and courtesans contend with the resulting violence and blood-soaked streets.
Lee didn’t want a modern-day era “because it’s hard to do a martial-arts epic when everyone’s walking around with guns,” Tropper says. The historical setting followed the California Gold Rush and railroad construction, when the influx of Chinese was so strong that the government enacted the 1882 Exclusion Act: “You could really explore that theme of being the ‘other’ arriving on our shores.”
“My father was really good at sort of spotting these themes that spoke to the Chinese experience,” Shannon Lee says. “Fists of Fury” explored Chinese-Japanese tension, and in “Way of the Dragon” (which he also directed), Lee played a Chinese man trying to establish and hold on to a restaurant - and his Asian culture – in Rome.
Koji, 31, admits he was more a fan of Jackie Chan and Jet Li growing up, perhaps a function of his younger age. But he recalls joking with castmates that he should have been a Bruce Lee fan.
“When I started seeing his interviews and how confident, charismatic and self actualized he was – he had that philosophical side and a quite spiritual side – that, to me, was quite eye-opening,” he says. “I didn’t know an Asian guy like that existed back then who was just so ahead of his time.”
There are nods and the occasional homage to Lee in “Warrior,” and the show features his martial-arts spirit in Ah Sahm’s evolving kung fu skills: He first starts as a Wing Chun fighter and then progresses during the season to more streetwise, practical moves from Lee’s signature Jeet Kune Do discipline.
There’s added pressure when you attach the Bruce Lee name to an action drama, Tropper says: “We have to have the best martial arts on television, period.”
“Every punch hurts and every kick hurts, and bones get broken and limbs get severed and noses get smashed,” Tropper says. “When fights get pretty, you lose the stakes.”
Had Bruce Lee’s “Warrior” come to fruition in the ’70s, “one imagines he would have been the only Chinese guy on the show,” Lin says with a laugh.
Shannon Lee says the show would most likely have lacked “the deep exploration of these racial tensions.” But her father would have been “extremely proud” of the 2019 version.
“This is his goal realized on a really large scale, and not just for a starring role for himself, but for this whole huge cast and getting to explore this world and these issues in a really in-depth way,” she says.