Iliyan Stoychev met with Daniel Wu, lead actor and executive producer of AMC’s upcoming series Into the Badlands, during MIPCOM in Cannes. Wu gave an exclusive interview for TVBIZZ and CEETV ahead of the premiere of one of the most anticipated premieres on US television this fall. The martial arts drama will debut on November 15 on AMC.


Q: Daniel, how did you get Into the Badlands?

DW: I started off just as an executive producer. Our other producing partner Stacey Sher who did Django Unchained called me one day and said ‘I have a content deal with AMC. AMC wants me to do a martial arts show but I don’t know anything about putting the art of martial arts for a film. Can you help me put it together?” So we got together, brainstormed some ideas what that world would be. Remember the Kung Fu series? In the beginning AMC wanted to do that. And I said let’s not do a rehash of something. Everybody does that. Honestly, that show was great culturally, but it was not the greatest show, the fighting was not great and the story was like a fortune cookie, it orientalized that a lot. So we hired Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, our show scriptwriters and they started to create the world that we gave them. AMC wanted two fights per episode, so the first season is six episodes, the subsequent season can be ten episodes, and so that’s one season twelve fights. And we shot that in four months.

In movies we do three/four fights per movie over a six-month period. And I am 40 and I will be 45-46 by the end of it. Jackie Chan does not even fight that much. So we needed to find someone 25-30. So we searched. AMC wanted an Asian guy to play the lead, good actor, good martial artist and to have some name. We searched for everybody and producers were still not satisfied and they turned to me and said “Would you consider it?” Director David Dobkin said “I can’t think of anyone else that can do it besides you.” So I said OK. I started training because I have not done martial arts movies for probably six years. I got into drama and romantic comedies or action films that don’t require that kind of fighting. Gun-shooting fighting is a lot easier. Once I started training I realized my body is still good and I can do it, but I still auditioned.

Q: Besides the martial arts element in the series, how would you describe it?

DW: I would say it’s a complex human drama. As in most post-apocalyptic and sci-fi stuff it is really a referred reflection of human nature and the society now more than what we are seeing in the future. What we see is this world, Badlands, how did it become this way, what does it say about us as human. It’s gone back to feudal times where these barons are running everything, there’s no structure, politics anymore. What rules is power by violence. It’s a reflection of our society from thousands of years ago till now how the humans gained power, by violence. We are hinting on that. And there are so many complex little storylines. And that’s on purpose because on the surface we want to make a martial arts drama but we also want to make a really good compelling story with cool characters for anybody to get into and then the martial arts become the bonus. The martial arts are relatively easy, it’s a visual thing, the hard part is writing the good story…I wanted a good character that I can get interested in and when they wrote the pilot I realized Sunny that was written as a really interesting character. He starts off as a really bad guy, he has killed 404 people and once he meets M.K. and his relationship with Veil develops he realizes that maybe that’s not what his core is. That maybe there is some good within him. It’s almost like the opposite of Breaking Bad (he is like really good normal teacher and becomes this mafia crazy guy at the end). And there’s also a spiritual side to the character. When we are talking about martial arts, there cannot only be fighting. The spiritual path for Sunny is a road to enlightenment.

Q: How have martial arts shaped you as a person?

DW: Wow. Extremely influential on my whole life. I started when I was 11. And my martial arts teacher was not only a kung fu teacher, he did tai-chi, he was an acupuncturist, a traditional Chinese medicine doctor, he was also a lawyer, as well as a Chinese brush painter. He was a renaissance man and was very rich in Chinese culture. For me as a Chinese kid growing up in America having a direct connection like that was amazing. It got me to understand and respect my culture in a way I would not have if I did not learn martial arts. And besides that, the basic things like respect, discipline and honor that get instilled in you. That helped me throughout my whole life. It pushed me through school, I studied architecture. It pushed me through my career as an actor because I knew from a very young age that if you don’t work hard at something, you don’t get results. And that’s one thing I learned from my teacher: you don’t learn martial arts to learn how to fight, you learn it to better yourself. And I hope kids these days understand that. It’s not something you learn to go to school and beat up somebody. It’s something to make you a better person.

Q: What else turns you on?

DW: I am very into art and music. And that inspires me in everything I do and I think that’s probably from the architecture background: to look for things that inspire me and my work and my craft that is outside of acting.

Q: You mentioned music. Is Alive [a boyband project with Wu for a mockumentary] going to be alive again?

DW: No. That was strictly for art’s sake. Because I am a terrible singer. People ask that question all the time. But in the end of the day I think it was a great project and we made our impact on it and it is dead, it is done, it is finished. If we try to reprise, that will defeat the purpose of it.

Q: You mentioned Jackie Chan in the beginning. You have worked with him. Have you discussed the show with him?

DW: He was a great mentor. We are in touch all of the time, but we don’t talk about work, we talk about personal stuff. But he was a good example to me how to work in this business. He is constantly working, never really taking time off and I have learned a lot from him by being around him for 18 years.

Q: What was the greatest challenge in your life?

DW: Well, couple of things. One is building this career in Hong Kong. Being an American boy coming back to Hong Kong, not speaking Cantonese (I spoke some Mandarin) and learning how to act in a foreign language was very difficult. And having to deal with several years of embarrassment because my language were not that good. And more recently and more personally, my mother passed away last year. I had to deal with this cancer thing that she had. The big challenging part was that at the end of the day there was nothing I could have done except being there and supporting her. In my world where the harder you work, the more results you get, in that situation no matter what I did, I could not do anything about it. I had to just accept that. It took me probably about a whole year after she passed away to get over that and learn to accept that that is life. Sometimes you get f****d up cards like that and you have to deal with it.

Q: What’s next for you now?

DW: I am working on a film in Hong Kong right now. It is a Ringo Lam movie. And that has been a big dream of mine to work with him. When I entered the business he stopped making films. So he’s been on a hiatus for ten years. He made a film last year and then he approached me to do this film. I did not even read the script and I said Yeah, I’ll do it. Because John Woo, Ringo Lam and Tsui Hark were the guys who started the whole Hong Kong new wave of classic Hong Kong films and I always wanted to work with him and him approaching me was a dream come true. It’s called Battle of Life but it may be called City on Fire 2. City on Fire (1979) was such a legendary film that he did so he is considering whether to reprise that name or not.