Daniel Wu received the Best from the East Award at the New York Asian Film Festival, capping a stretch that has put him back at the center of Hong Kong’s two biggest franchises: “Cold War 1994” and the “Twilight of the Warriors” series.
“Cold War 1994” is the third installment in the “Cold War” series, a prequel written and directed by Longman Leung and produced by Bill Kong and Ivy Ho, set in the run-up to Hong Kong’s 1997 handover. The first two films, released in 2012 and 2016, were the highest-grossing Hong Kong productions of their respective years. In the new film, Wu plays Peter Choi opposite Terrance Lau’s M.B. Lee, a character previously portrayed as a full-blown villain by Chang Kuo-chu in “Cold War 2.”
Wu tells Variety he never consciously stepped away from Hong Kong film. The pandemic simply thinned out a schedule that had settled into a rhythm of one American project and one Asian project a year. When “Cold War” came along, the pull was the production itself.
“It’s going to be a quality production, the scale of it, the script,” Wu says of what drew him back, pointing also to the chance to work alongside three generations of Hong Kong actors, including Lau, whom he singles out as representative of the industry’s new generation.
The film folds a police procedural into a much larger political canvas, tracking the British colonial government, the Hong Kong police, a powerful business dynasty and the criminal underworld as the territory changes hands. Wu, who was 22 at the time of the actual handover, says the setting let the production dig into a period of corruption and upheaval he lived through but never fully understood until now.
Playing a younger version of a character already established as an antagonist gave Wu a different kind of challenge than he’s used to. He calls the role the most morally ambiguous he’s taken on, since it required tracing how a man who becomes an “evil mastermind” gets there gradually, through a series of compromised choices, rather than starting out that way.
Returning to a Hong Kong set after several years away felt less like a job and more like a reunion, Wu says. He recalls arriving for his costume fitting and recognizing nearly everyone in the room, a small-industry familiarity he doesn’t get on American productions, where he’s lucky to know one or two people on a given crew. Sitting down on set with his rice box for lunch, eating char siu fan alongside people he’d worked with for decades, brought back what he calls a genuinely warm feeling. He credits Hong Kong crews with a particular work ethic: “efficient, fast, and no bullshit,” a directness he links to a broader Hong Kong attitude of simply getting things done.
Wu spent much of his “Cold War 1994” press tour in Hong Kong wearing a hat that, it turns out, was hiding a new haircut for his role in “Twilight of the Warriors: The Final Chapter,” the sequel to director Soi Cheang’s “Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In.” That 2024 film, adapted from Yu Yi’s novel “City of Darkness” and the manhua of the same name by Andy Seto, became Hong Kong’s second-biggest commercial hit ever and swept the Hong Kong Film Awards. Where “Walled In” was set in the 1980s, the new installment moves the story to 1993, the year Kowloon’s Walled City was demolished.
Wu, who studied the Walled City’s architecture in school, calls the setting a rare chance to build a mainstream action franchise around a genuinely singular piece of Hong Kong urban history. He sees both projects as part of a broader shift in how Hong Kong cinema treats its own past, using the 1990s, a decade he says filmmakers “glossed over” while living through it, as material for reflection rather than backdrop.
That shift, Wu says, is happening at a moment when Hong Kong productions can draw on newer digital tools while still leaning on the practical, in-camera stunt work the industry built its reputation on, recalling a time when performers “threw themselves off the top of a building and just did it for real in camera.” He pushes back on the long-running narrative that Hong Kong film is dying, arguing instead that it’s in something closer to a renaissance, even with a fraction of the annual output it had in the 1980s and ’90s. “There’s a lot of interesting films being made, whether big scale or small scale, a lot of great performances, a lot of great scripts being written,” he says.
The kinds of roles Wu is offered in Hong Kong have shifted too, from the younger leading-man parts that defined much of his career to more mature, fatherly characters, a change he credits partly to age and partly to the character work he’s done in the U.S., where his credits have included the AMC martial-arts series “Into the Badlands,” HBO’s “Westworld,” the film “Tomb Raider” and the animated series “American Born Chinese.” He says that kind of opportunity has thinned out generally, arguing Hollywood has moved past a period of genuinely interesting roles for Asian American actors and back toward “crumbs” or stereotypical parts. He’s more pointed about the ceiling he still sees in the industry, where he says opportunities for Asian American actors, and especially Asian American males, remain narrow.
Moving between the two industries has left Wu with what he describes as an unusual sense of identity, neither fully of one world nor the other, but both at once. He notes that his experience differs from most Asian American peers, many of whom have never topped a call sheet, while his own career has run the opposite path: character roles in the U.S., leading roles in Asia. He also points to a structural difference between the two systems: Asian productions tend to run through a single director’s vision, while larger American productions are often shaped by committee, with multiple producers weighing in, leaving him unsure at times whose direction to follow.
Looking back over 25 years, Wu points to his collaboration with director Derek Yee, spanning six films including “One Nite in Mongkok,” “Drink-Drank-Drunk,” “Protégé” and “Triple Tap,” as the turning point that pulled him away from the romantic leads he was initially cast in and toward the darker, more complex characters he prefers. He likens the partnership to Robert De Niro’s with Martin Scorsese, a shorthand so complete that he’d commit to a Yee project without reading the script. “That put my career in a direction that I wanted it to go,” he says.
Wu is now developing two scripts for the American market and one for the mainland Chinese market, a deliberate move toward more proactive control over his own projects, with an eye toward eventually returning to directing, nearly two decades after his 2007 feature debut, “Heavenly Kings.” Whatever comes next, he says the appeal hasn’t changed. Whether it’s a script’s demands or the actors around him, every project still teaches him something new. “I would say the craft, the craft still challenges me,” Wu says.