'Wicked' Star Michelle Yeoh Has Long Said Enough Is Never Enough—“I Want More!”

Yeoh says her father, who died in 2014, always encouraged his children to follow their own paths. “There will be no point where you turn around and say, ‘I wanted to do this, but you said I had to do that,’ ” he told his daughter. For the younger Yeoh, plan A was to eventually have her own ballet school. She had trained as a dancer since the age of 4, and physical prowess ran in the family: “My mom is the reason we are so sporty and outgoing. She played badminton until she was in her 70s, and now in her 80s she is still dancing and singing.”

But a back injury sustained while studying at the Royal Academy of Dance in London set Yeoh on a different course. She ultimately switched her major to creative arts, with a minor in drama, and at 22 was cast in a Hong Kong TV commercial opposite Jackie Chan. Shortly afterward, a film production company offered her a contract.

“In your head, all these Chinese parents go, ‘Acting? Nooo!’ ” Yeoh says. “But my dad’s support gave me confidence as a young adult trying to do new things, knowing that if I went to Hong Kong and failed miserably, I could go home and decide again what I wanted to do.”

She never had to. It took just a year for Yeoh to hit it big with her first starring role, in 1985’s Yes, Madam, which kick-started Hong Kong’s “girls with guns” action subgenre. “My Hong Kong career was really a baptism by fire,” she recalls. She made three more movies over the next two years, then married her film production company’s cofounder when she was 25. Cue Plan B: Retire from show business and dedicate herself to raising the children they would inevitably have. Her decision, she always emphasizes, was borne out of both what she calls an inability to multitask moviemaking and parenting as well as a lifelong dream of being a mother. But she and her husband were unable to conceive.

“I knew my ex really wanted a big family,” she told Gwyneth Paltrow on her Goop podcast earlier this year. “I was looking at myself going, ‘Ten years down the road, you can’t have [a child], what are we gonna do?’ In hindsight it was the smart thing to step away and not pretend that it will work out. Yes, we did love each other, but there were expectations. So it was a tough, tough thing.”

After her divorce, Yeoh unretired and found success again almost immediately, this time with the 1992 classic Police Story 3: Supercop, in which she went death-defying stunt for death-defying stunt with Chan. A few years later, having established herself as one of Hong Kong’s top stars, a producer friend encouraged her to go West.

“I was like, why?” she recalls. “I was having a ball in Hong Kong. I have my extended family there, there’s the sea, the mountains, the food­—why go to L.A.?” Eventually she relented: “Why not? Nothing to lose, right?”

Hollywood was a rude awakening. “People started saying, ‘You’re a minority.’ How did I suddenly become a minority? There are how many billions of us around the world?” she says. “Also I come from Malaysia, where we are multiracial, just different cultures in a beautiful country.”

Ziyi Zhang, Michelle Yeoh and Li Gong in the 2005 film ‘Memoirs of a Geisha’.

Columbia/Courtesy Everett Collection

The trip wasn’t a total wash—she met the Bond film executives, which eventually led to landing the female lead in Tomorrow Never Dies. But Yeoh had to endure her share of microaggressions, like auditions that always had to justify an Asian character’s ethnicity (“The scripts always had to explain why a Chinese person was there. Oh God, she’s just a weather reporter!”) and constant amazement at her grasp of English (which is part of the mandatory curriculum in Malaysian schools). “I finally started saying, ‘The flight over here was 13 hours, so I learned English,’ ” she laughs. “I didn’t let them get me down.”

In early 2022 on the eve of Everything Everywhere’s release, Yeoh told me that she and Todt, 78, a French auto racing executive (who now serves as the UN’s special envoy for road safety), were determined to finally tie the knot in the coming year. The two had been engaged since 2004, within a month of their first meeting in Shanghai at an event for Ferrari; Todt was then the CEO. They came close to marrying in 2014, but their wedding was postponed upon the passing of Yeoh’s father. “Jean said, ‘You don’t want to marry me,’ ” she recalls. “‘Oh yes, I do want to marry you!’ He kept saying, ‘Why aren’t we doing it?’ So finally, I said, ‘OK, OK, let’s get the lawyers. Let’s go and do it!’ ”

It wasn’t intentional that the wedding would serve as the cherry on top of Yeoh’s banner year. The couple spent nearly two years gathering all the required documentation for a marriage license in Geneva, Switzerland, where they have lived since 2009. (Todt was president of international motor sports’ governing body FIA, which has an office there, until 2021.) The ceremony in July 2023 took place at a civil register office, which Yeoh imagined would be a simple “sign at the counter” affair. Even after her inner circle insisted on flying out to bear witness, she told them to expect a casual dress code. That is, until her close friend Diego Della Valle, the owner of the Schiaparelli design house, balked. “No! You’re not getting married in a white shirt!” he exclaimed, dispatching his label’s creative director to fashion a custom ivory corseted bridal gown for the occasion.

Yeoh’s marriage is different from the traditional bond she had envisioned as a younger woman. “Jean travels a lot. I’m always working,” she says. “But in a relationship, most important is the respect you show each other for what you do. That’s been very good for Jean and me.”

She acknowledges that this appreciation has come in part from meeting later in life and also from wisdom gained by making mistakes and learning from them. (Todt was also previously married.) “I don’t think anybody has a perfect life,” says Yeoh, who remains friends with her ex-husband; his eldest daughter is one of her godchildren. “What is perfection? It’s learning, evolving and developing that gets you to a place where you are content and at peace.”

As Everything Everywhere All at Once gained traction in theaters, Yeoh found herself, after nearly four decades and more than 50 movies, grappling with an unfamiliar role: awards darling. “I’m a mature woman, but I was a rookie at Oscar campaigning. Everybody else had been there for so long,” she says of such veterans as her fellow nominees Cate Blanchett and Michelle Williams.

Fortunately, Yeoh says, filming Wicked was a perfect antidote to the awards hoopla, “and reminded me not just of the glitz, but the hard work of making a movie.”

Yeoh was the front-runner going into Oscars night, but after sitting through most of the ceremony in the front row, she was suddenly plagued by nerves. “It struck me: My mom is at the viewing party in Kuala Lumpur with her friends and family. There’s so many of them, they got dressed up, they arranged that whole event. What if I lose?” she says.

If you rewatch the clip, just before the winner’s announcement, you can see the anxiety rippling beneath Yeoh’s usually serene facade. The fear wasn’t of losing the individual recognition—it was of letting down her community. Fortunately for everyone involved, we live in the version of the universe where Yeoh did win the Academy Award for best actress, the first Asian woman ever to do so. “Just think of all the shoulders I’m standing on,” she says of Asian performers who preceded her in Hollywood. “It just landed on me to have the microphone and say we deserve to be here. It’s not a responsibility; it’s a necessity to speak out.”

Director Jon Chu says Yeoh’s Oscar coronation hasn’t changed her at all. “Zero ego has come out of this. Her purity of focus on craft is as strong as it was before,” he says. “I think it just gave her a hug from everyone, saying, ‘We recognize you and we see you.’ ”

Toward the end of her acceptance speech she exhorted on behalf of all women—“Ladies, don’t let anybody tell you you are ever past your prime”—an expression that struck many listeners as particularly pointed. “It was important for me to say that, because when you allow that to happen, they put you in a box,” she explains now. “I mean, when you’re in your [late] 30s, if you’re pregnant, it’s a geriatric pregnancy! Why is it that numbers matter so much, especially for women? It seems like the clock is ticking a lot faster for us.”

“Even though I say I work too much, I thrive on working. I love being with creative people,” Yeoh says.

Pal Hansen

The Oscar win has ensured that Yeoh is busier than ever, with film and TV projects, her brand commitments, her advocacy work. “I have all my scripts around me, stacks of them, and I’m trying to memorize the lines. When I was a kid in school I would say, ‘One day I won’t have to study anymore.’ Guess what I’m doing at 62?” she laughs. “Studying!”

She concedes she is working too much, even by her manic standards. “I need to stop and enjoy the people around me,” says Yeoh of her found and chosen family, which includes six godchildren as well as a new grandchild born to Todt’s son and his partner.

“I have to at some point make a conscious decision to take at least a month off to spend time with family back in Malaysia, hopefully visit family in Hong Kong,” she hazards, somewhat unconvincingly.

“The truth is, I love what I do,” Yeoh continues with a sigh, “Even though I say I work too much, I thrive on working. I love being with creative people. I thrive on being challenged, because then I am learning, I am evolving.”

Jamie Lee Curtis, who at age 64 won her own first Oscar, also for Everything Everywhere, understands. “The older we get, the more sedentary and isolated we get, because often we are no longer allowed to do the work that brought us into contact with others,” Curtis explains. “But people like Michelle and I, who are artists, must take advantage of this moment, and sacrifice a quieter time. She is taking full advantage of it in every aspect of her work: humanitarian, philanthropic, advertising, creative.”

It’s fitting that Everything Everywhere All at Once, the movie that changed Yeoh’s life in a lifetime full of inflection points, is one that contemplates the paths not taken. What would Yeoh’s younger selves—the aspiring ballerina, the anticipatory stay-at-home mom—think of the journey she ultimately embarked on?

“That is a good question. When you’re younger, you’re too busy living it up to think about that. I went to England in my teens, then graduated and moved to Hong Kong. It was climbing and moving forward and falling down and getting up, getting new opportunities, suddenly doing action movies,” she reflects. “I’m not the kind of person who thinks, ‘Oh, I should have done that.’ I wouldn’t be where I am today.

“My dad always said to me: ‘I wish you enough,’ ” she continues. “When I was young, I would say, ‘No, I don’t want to have enough! I want more!’ Now I understand. It’s learning to be content. Live with an open hand, not a tight fist.”