The Reluctant Multi - Hyphenate

Daniel Wu on Asian Men in Hollywood and Why He Never Wants to Be President 
 

- Farhan Shah

It’s five minutes to eight in the morning and I’m sitting in the conference room at the office, waiting for the phone to ring. Just the night before, I had binged on dozens of YouTube clips until my eye bags had their own eye bags. But it was all for work, of course. I was getting up to speed on Daniel Wu’s latest project, a martial arts television series called Into the Badlands. It’s visceral, bloody and very much in your face, so I don’t imagine it’s going to be aired in Singapore (currently on AXN) without first getting its guts and heart ripped out by our country’s rather zealous censorship board, but it makes for interesting viewing.

The phone rings exactly at 8am. Surprising punctuality from a star, I mused while picking it up. Daniel Wu is on the other end of the line. He’s back home in Oakland, residence of the Golden State Warriors basketball team of which Wu is a massive fan. We exchange pleasantries. He seems fresh, even happy to be talking to me. I look at my list of questions and scratch out the one about Steph Curry and gang failing spectacularly at the 2016 NBA Finals. I couldn’t bear to do it to Wu.

“Why are you back home?” I ask instead.

“Oh, just in the middle of doing all the press interviews for Into the Badlands. I’m heading off in about a week to finish the filming of Tomb Raider. We have about a month more of filming to go for that.”

Wu is experiencing an acting Renaissance of sorts in Hollywood. Besides Tomb Raider, which is expected to be out in 2018, Wu also has a small but critical role in Geostorm, playing a scientist who discovers the reason why the satellites are destroying Earth. “That film is interesting because I’m playing a character that is totally different from anything that most people know me for. I am a nerdy guy, not the one kicking ass,” Wu laughs.