8/30/2023 0 Comments Gangland tv show history channel“This isn’t just about what we get to do personally as actors,” says Olivia Cheng, who portrays a fictionalized version of Ah Toy, a historical figure who was a sex worker and entrepreneur. “I think we all feel the weight of that, but also feel very lucky to be a part of it.” Olivia Cheng says ‘Warrior’ is not just a job for its actors, it’s also about correcting a slight against Bruce Lee, who created the show some 50 years ago. “We’re all under the guiding light of Bruce Lee’s legacy,” says co-showrunner Josh Stoddard, who took over the writers room with Evan Endicott for Season 3. For them, Warrior is not just a job, it’s a mission being carried out in Bruce Lee’s memory. That’s a feeling shared across the entire Warrior crew. “ Warrior taught me so much, man, about what I can actually do,” he says. The work is exhausting, but also deeply fulfilling. When he’s not on set, he’s in Chan’s dojo, training. Beyond the demands of being number one on the call sheet of an hour-long dramatic series, Koji also performs all of his own fight scenes, even collaborating with the stunt team on the design of the action and helping to shoot the rough “previs” versions of the fights in Brett Chan’s studio whenever possible. It’s a responsibility that Koji takes very seriously, demonstrating a work ethic that has wowed his castmates. “A lot of the actors who have been in the game a lot longer than me are saying that a job like Warrior doesn’t come along that often,” says star Andrew Koji, “one that’s fulfilling and collaborative and meaningful and fun.” Koji plays Ah Sahm, the lead role Bruce Lee created for himself. It didn’t take long for the new team to realize that they were embarking on something extraordinary. With the blessing and confidence of premium cable channel Cinemax, Warrior constructed nine blocks of stylized 1870s San Francisco at Cape Town Film Studios in South Africa and assembled what is still a rarity for a Hollywood production - a predominantly Asian cast. It would take another five years before the series made it to screen, as Lee and Lin recruited the rest of the creative team, which would be led by showrunner Jonathan Tropper, a martial artist himself who had great enthusiasm for Bruce Lee’s work and philosophy. Impressed with its quality, Lin asked for permission to develop it for modern television. In 2014, Lin reached out to Shannon Lee, Bruce’s daughter and CEO of the Bruce Lee Family Companies, and asked to read the mythical treatment. One such fan was Justin Lin, Hollywood producer and director of Star Trek Beyond and five films in the Fast & Furious franchise. After his death in 1973, the treatment sat untouched in the archives of Bruce Lee Entertainment, but it remained the stuff of legend within the family and among Bruce Lee aficionados. The series would have starred Lee as a Chinese martial arts prodigy arriving in America in the late 19th century, a time when tensions between recently immigrated Chinese workers and the white establishment were at a boiling point. Warrior began as a treatment written by legendary martial artist Bruce Lee, who shopped it unsuccessfully to television networks in the early ‘70s. “The long arc of this show is that it took 50 years to get it made, and then it got canceled,” says producer Shannon Lee (who, like everyone interviewed for this article, spoke with Observer before the SAG-AFTRA strike). It’s one of the rituals that binds the cast of Warrior into a unified company, one that they have struggled - and continue to struggle - to keep together. But it’s also a bonding experience, a challenge that allows the cast and the stunt performers (not all of whom speak a common language) to build trust. Warrior features at least one elaborate fight sequence in each episode, so the exercise has an immediate application. Andrew Koji, who performs all of his own fight scenes on ‘Warrior.’ David Bloomer/MaxĮach morning during the production of Warrior, the stars and stunt actors gather at the studio of stunt coordinator Brett Chan to train in two distinct martial arts, selected at random from the fight team’s global repertoire.
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