In AMC’s new martial arts series, Into the Badlands, Daniel Wu plays Sunny, a motorcycle-riding, katana-wielding assassin whose loyalty to his flinty-eyed master is matched only by his prodigious kill count (400 and climbing).
Al Gough and Miles Millar, of Smallville fame, are the show’s proud creators, but on a recent afternoon at the Soho House club in West Hollywood, they were holding forth on another martial arts television series, Kung Fu, the 1970s drama with David Carradine as a Shaolin monk.
“I actually thought it was kind of boring,” Gough, 48, said of the series, which he first saw in reruns as a boy. “There wasn’t enough fighting in it. And then I realised, Oh my God, it’s a white dude.”
When Into the Badlands begins on Monday, it will be the only martial arts drama on television, and one of the few to tackle the genre since Kung Fu aired four decades ago. Biographers of martial arts legend Bruce Lee claim that he lost out on the lead role in that earlier series because network executives didn’t think US audiences would watch a TV show starring a Chinese-American martial artist, even a show ostensibly about a Chinese-American martial artist. The role went to Carradine, whose kung fu skills were lacklustre and who was not, of course, Chinese.
“Looking back, it was a travesty,” Millar said.
In many ways, Badlands is an effort to right that wrong while simultaneously bringing authentic Hong Kong-style kung fu to US audiences. The producers assembled a team of specialists and stuntmen led by the fight director and actor Stephen Fung (House of Fury, Tai Chi Hero) and the martial arts choreographer Ku Huen Chiu (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), and took them to Louisiana, where the series is filmed.
Badlands is set in a post-apocalyptic future in what was once the US Midwest, where all-powerful “barons” rule the land with the help of armies of warriors (think shoguns and samurai, except with oil fields). The show’s creators selected Wu, a Hong Kong star with more than 60 films to his credit, for the role of Sunny.
Born in Berkeley and raised in nearby Orinda, Wu was initially brought on board as an executive producer involved in the martial arts side of the series. He balked at accepting the lead role because of the physical effort it entailed.
“I was 40 when I started the show, and I wasn’t sure if my body could take it,” Wu said in a phone interview from Hong Kong.
His were valid concerns. As with action films in Hong Kong, the production of Badlands was divided between two units running concurrently: a main unit, with its full roster of actors and directors and makeup artists, and an equally large unit dedicated to fight scenes. The lead actor would have to work in both groups on a six-day-a-week schedule, combining full days with the main unit with the infamous training regimens required of Hong Kong-style martial arts filmmaking.
The search for the lead actor lasted four months, with the producers seeing scores of hopefuls from the United States, Europe, Asia and Australia. Most could do martial arts and a few could act, but very few could do both.
“We saw people who, if there actually was a Badlands in real life, they could probably be Sunny,” Gough said, laughing. “But they couldn’t act.”
After prodding from the creators and producers, Wu finally agreed to take the role.
“I think maybe that was our secret intention all along,” said an executive producer, Stacey Sher (Django Unchained, Erin Brockovich). “As a friend said to me, how can you do a martial arts television series with Daniel Wu that doesn’t star Daniel Wu?”
The show began production last summer in southeast Louisiana, where the cast and crew endured temperatures that spiked into the high 90s (fahrenheit), besides New Orleans’ oppressive humidity, and swarms of large, hungry mosquitoes. Add to that the show’s accelerated shooting schedule (six days per fight scene, as opposed to two weeks in your typical Hong Kong film), and one can see why martial-arts series are so rare.
“When we got into it, we were like, now we know why no one else is doing this,” Wu said. “Because it’s so hard.”
The series features two major fights per episode. Keen-eyed fans will spot homages to several well-known martial arts scenes, from the rain-soaked swordfight in Wong Kar-wai’s The Grandmaster to Lee’s battle royale in the Japanese dojo in Fist of Fury (aka The Chinese Connection). The level of violence equals those of Hong Kong action films, with eviscerations, snapped necks and impalements galore. In one scene, a master swordswoman named the Widow (Emily Beecham) juliennes a victim so neatly that all that’s left of him is a crimson cloud.
“We spent a lot of time talking to standards and practices,” Millar said.
In Hollywood action movies, directors mask their actors’ subpar fighting skills with shaky camera moves and extreme close-ups. In Badlands, the camera pulls way back, so that viewers can see 10 combatants (or 20, or 30) in a single shot.
“The difference between American action and Hong Kong action is that in Hong Kong, you go wide,” Millar said.
Badlands isn’t the first martial arts outing for Gough and Millar. The first two films they wrote together were Lethal Weapon 4, with Jet Li, and the Jackie Chan film Shanghai Noon. In 1998, midway between Kung Fu and Badlands, the two were writers on the CBS series Martial Law, which featured the Hong Kong action film star Sammo Hung as a Chinese policeman fighting crime in Los Angeles. The series was notable not for its story line or acting, but for its lead’s top-notch kung fu credentials. The show, Gough said, was sold to CBS on the strength of a single fight scene in a garage.
“In some ways, it was the worst way to do a show,” he said.
For Badlands, the creators were determined to make sure that the story and acting were at least as good as the fight sequences and that the cast was as diverse and gender-balanced as possible. Sunny’s fiercest rival, the Widow, is played by a British woman; his love interest is black (Madeleine Mantock); the actor who plays his boss (Marton Csokas) hails from New Zealand; and his young protege is portrayed by a performer of German/East Indian/Pakistani descent (Aramis Knight).
When the writers created the show, Sher said, “all of the main barons were men.” But, she added, “my personal crusade is to turn everybody into a feminist.”
And then there’s Wu, that rarest of actors on US TV: an Asian-American romantic lead in a drama series (members of that tiny fraternity have been largely confined to comedies, including the short-lived Selfie and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend). But it’s a milestone that Wu nearly overlooked, having starred in Hong Kong films for 18 years.
“I really didn’t think about it until people started asking me about it,” he said. “And then someone sent me a picture of the billboard on Melrose Avenue, and I was like, ‘OK, this is crazy — I can’t remember seeing a billboard of an Asian dude on an American show, like, ever.’”
Don’t miss it
Into the Badlands airs in the UAE on AMC every Monday at 6am with a repeat at 10pm.
