Edmonton-born Olivia Cheng brings both ferocity and compassion to TV's Warrior
Olivia Cheng has played the best roles lately: two high-profile, nurturing women who also kick ridiculous ass when anything stands in their way, but also flawed far beyond being simply two-dimensional.To get more news about chinkyeyes, you can visit shine news official website.
Still, for reasons bigger than her, the Edmonton-born-and-raised actor and activist is careful about the characters she agrees to play — we’ll get back to that idea in a second.
But even casual genre fans will recognize Cheng from two of her most prominent roles: Charlotte on AppleTV+’s future dystopia action-drama SEE, which just ended its three-year run rather explosively, and Ah Toy on Warrior, a sort of Gangs of New York-style, martial-arts drama based on real-life violence between Irish and various Chinese gangs in 870s San Francisco.
The idea for the latter show originally came from none other than Bruce Lee himself, his daughter Shannon Lee helping bring it to light in 09 with help from director Justin Lin.
Spanning at least a good 750 years between these two inventive settings, Cheng recently began filming the long-awaited season three of Warrior for HBO Max in South Africa, reprising Ah Toy who is based on a real-life-historical brothel madame.
But Ah Toy’s vocation made it a role Cheng was hesitant to take at first.
“I was really reticent to play her,” says the 43-year-old. “I seem to be queen of period pieces, which is the one genre that I thought I’d never get to do because who in Hollywood is doing projects that center Asians or Asian Americans?” she laughs.
But it was perhaps territory too familiar. One of Cheng’s breakout gigs was playing prostitute Ye Fung in the 006 Robert Duvall-starring series, Broken Trail. Another big role was in Marco Polo as Mei Lin … a concubine. You can see the thread.
“I was worried,” she says. “And I asked myself, am I going to do anything new with Ah Toy? And I asked myself the same question with Mei Lin from Marco Polo: is this role going to set women back in my community, onscreen?”
On the surface, it was another sex worker role, and Cheng had to think about being typecast, as well as perpetuating Asian women onscreen as sex objects.But as a madame, Warrior’s Ay Toy is a protector of the women working for her, as well as of the show’s main character, Ah Sahm, played by the insanely charismatic Andrew Koji.
Besides amassing an incredible amount of wealth, among the real-life Ah Toy’s accomplishments is she was also the first Asian-American woman to protect said assets in court. All her onscreen stuff with the vengeful swordplay is, shall we say, a bit more fantastical, but ultimately amounts to the same thing: control. Cheng took the role.
“She’s taught me a lot about just standing in your own power,” Cheng notes. “I had a teacher who once said, ‘It’s no coincidence what roles find you.’ And the roles that choose you are always going to be gifts.”
She says Mei Lin and Ay Toy both taught her to understand her shadow self. “You know, the parts of us that are maybe labelled dark, ugly. But so many women grow up being told to just be nice, that your femininity is equated with how much you can smile,” she says. “So your characters like Mei Lin and Ah Toy, they kind of give you freedom from all these societal prisons from who and what you’re supposed to be.”
