Chen Tang on Joining the Cast of ‘Warrior’ [Interview]

There’s a new addition to Warrior this season. The drama series based on the writings of Bruce Lee has brought on Chen Tang, who also starred in the film Mulan, to play the role of Hong, an eccentric, yet still deadly soldier, whose presence creates a bit of a dynamic.

I recently spoke with Tang about his role on Warrior, his training, and his experiences working on Mulan.

Tang said he was excited to be part of Warrior for a pretty simple reason. Bruce Lee.

“He’s been sort of my childhood hero for as long as I can remember, I think. Bruce Lee was probably the first person that when I saw him, it made me proud to be an Asian man in America. And to be able to be a part of this legacy and also to work with his daughter, who is our executive producer, and to also sort of extend that sort of the story that he came up with and to pay homage to that and that was… When I got it, I was just stoked. And I was like, ‘Wow.’ It’s really a dream come true.”

The role also meant traveling from New Zealand, where he’d been filming Mulan, directly to South Africa. 

“Being in Cape Town gave me so much for my role, as well, creatively,” he said. “With my character, Hong, he’s really this sort of fresh off the boat, from the motherland kind of character. And so if you imagine somebody who’s just traveled in the 19th century, 7,000 miles across the Pacific Ocean, landed in a completely alien world. Every site, every smell, every sound of the language is all brand new. So for me, that’s literally when I got to Cape Town, I was like, ‘This is how Hong feels every single day.'”

“I met so many different types of people,” he continued, noting how it was a “completely foreign, alien culture” to him. “Even the language — they have 11 national languages in South Africa, so I just was just like an explorer sort of channeling how Hong would feel. Every single day it gave me something new.”

Tang’s character was introduced on the most recent episode of Warrior, and his personality is a bit different compared to some of the other characters. “Hong is a very genuinely nice, almost childlike guy,” he explained. “He’s just a genuinely, very happy-go-lucky guy who happens to be a vicious mass murderer.”

“What I love about the character is because our show Warrior, it gets pretty heavy,” he noted. “It’s pretty brutal out there in the 19th century and it’s starvation everywhere and warlords, just pretty oppressive. And if you’ve been through a lot of hard stuff in your life, you can go one or two ways. You can dwell on it, or you can try to see the bright side in things. And that is the way I decided to bring a lot of light and humor and joy into the way Hong sees the world.”

Preparing for this role meant a lot of hard work for Tang. While he’d had martial arts training in the past, working with the stunt teams on Warrior was an entirely new experience for him.

“I was working with some of these stunt guys and the stunt teams that are, I mean, and when I say, ‘world-class,” they were ‘world-class,‘” he emphasized. “That was such a big part of my preparation because the way someone moves really tells you how they see the world. And they gave me so much about my physicality that I just took on.”

“We worked every single day. I was probably at the stunt tent for eight to 10 hours a day just recovering,” Tang continued. “I felt like a pro athlete, because it was just… You’re working on your body, but you’re also trying to recover so you work out again.”

“Besides the character work that I did every day as an actor, I really took the time to allow the physicality, especially in this role to just sort of inform the way I saw the world, because HBO and Brett Chan and the producers and the show writer, they were all so great about… Basically, they said to me, ‘You know what? Whatever you want to bring to this character, we’ll meet you halfway.'”

“Brett Chan, our stunt coordinator, basically said, ‘If we took a silhouette of everybody on the show who fights, if you couldn’t see who they are, you should be able to see who they are based on the way they move,'” Tang explained. He then decided that for his own character, he wanted him to “meet everything head on” and “try to avoid hitting as much as possible.”

One of Tang’s goals in acting is to “portray human stories that connect the East to the West.” I asked Tang how this role fit into accomplishing that goal and why that connection is so important.

“I’ll take the way Bruce Lee described himself. He called himself a mid-Pacific man. And when he’s in America, he’s fully American and fully embraces that. And then when he’s in China and Hong Kong, he fully embraces that, as well. There’s something that happens where you feel actually fully bicultural and that to me is such an interesting way to look at the world,” Tang said.

“The more we can connect stories and, for me, to work on roles that not only celebrate the culture, but also are living it and truly authentic to a culture, the more that you can actually see that it’s just someone’s humanity,” he continued. “The more you see it’s just like, ‘You know what? Maybe we’re not so different after all.’ Because we really aren’t.”

“That really is the power of our humanity in our empathy because you can make a choice to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, see from their perspective, listen to them rather than to judge them. And when we do that, that’s the beginning of how people get closer. And to me, that is a choice. It’s not an easy choice,” Tang noted. “That to me is the responsibility of an artist and to show our humanity. And as we show our humanity, other people might be like, ‘You know what? I don’t want to see this person as just a Chinese person or American. This is just a human being.’ And that’s the goal, isn’t it?”

Of course, Tang and I also had to discuss his recent role on the film, Mulan, which he said was an experience he’d never forget.

“It was, to put it simply, one of the great experiences of my life,” he shared. “Disney really is a dream factory. It was so epic, that the epicness almost became normal because you were just entering this world and there it was. You need a castle? They built the castle. You could just walk in. You could walk up the steps, you could fight on the ramps, whatever you want.”

“So it was thrilling. Every day I would pinch myself on set and just be like, ‘Wow. I don’t want to wake up, if this is a dream.'”

With the size of the production being so large, and with so many people involved, Tang said he found self-care to be particularly important while working on Mulan.

“There were some days there’s almost a thousand people on set and just to how important it was, for me especially, to just get in my own little bubble, in my own little self, because that’s what I need as, not only an actor to do my work, but also as human beings to stay sane,” Tang said.

He also made it a point to be sure he was grateful for every moment while on set.

“In Chinese, we have a saying called, Shoshin. It means beginner’s mind, it’s a Zen, sort of Buddhist philosophy. And it really means, so when you look at something, even though you’ve been doing it forever, if you look at something as a beginner or as a child would, that’s where discoveries come. That’s where the creative mind can just really flourish.”

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Warrior airs Fridays at 10/9c on Cinemax.

*Featured image credit: Ryan West Photo

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