‘He left without a word’: How a family secret shaped a cinema icon’s career

A difficult childhood may have helped lay the foundations for Tony Leung’s long Hollywood career.

Back in 2020, Australia was one of the few places on Earth where you could still safely shoot a Hollywood movie. We were pre-vaccines but between lockdowns, which is why Asia’s – and therefore, arguably, the world’s – biggest heartthrob found himself shooting his first English-language movie in Sydney. Plenty of locals recognised Hong Kong’s first man of cinema (casually hanging at Darling Harbour; strolling around Moore Park) and promptly lost their minds – inevitable, given Cantonese is Australia’s fifth-most spoken language. Wherever he is in the world, though, people tend to lose it around Tony Leung.

Leung was here to play the villainous father in Marvel’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, based on the franchise’s kung-fu-inspired comics from the 1970s. On his days off, Leung blended into Aussie culture. He surfed, took road trips to Byron Bay and jogged through Sydney’s Botanic Gardens. “It’s a very different city,” Leung reminisces to me, via an early-morning Zoom call from New York City. He was especially struck by Sydney’s casual attitude to … well, everything. “Even when you go to a Michelin-star restaurant, you don’t have to dress up!”

Debuting in the Marvel Cinematic Universe was a milestone for Leung’s career, but his presence marked a turning point for the MCU, too. Alongside Simu Liu, Michelle Yeoh and Awkwafina, Leung was part of an all-star cast that finally gave Marvel its first Asian-led superhero movie. (It had only taken 25 films.) Still, if you were a fan of the MCU, or Tony Leung – and especially if you were Asian, like me – you had reason to worry. In the original Shang-Chi comics, the OG baddie-daddy was Dr. Fu Manchu. Between his made-up Oriental name, jaundice-yellow skin, gross goatee, long fingernails and obsession with invading the West, Fu Manchu – a sorcerer, no less! – was one of Marvel’s most racist, two-dimensional bogeyman creations.

Wisely, the MCU devised an original character for Leung: a layered, emotionally complex and flawed parent-figure named Xu Wenwu. The movie’s themes – love and revenge, loyalty and betrayal – were also classic Tony Leung territory. He didn’t need much convincing. Plus, who else gets to play a Marvel anti-hero and warlord in their late 50s? Moreover, Shang-Chi would require Leung to perform the kind of fight scenes and stunts that made him famous in Hong Kong as a 20-something. It felt like a homecoming. “We Chinese used to have all those martial arts hero shows on TV, so this remin