Long before Michelle Yeoh was jumping motorcycles onto moving trains, fighting beside James Bond or holding an Academy Award, she arrived in Hong Kong with almost no idea that she was about to become an action star.

One of the first people waiting on the other side of that transformation was Jackie Chan.

Yeoh has recalled that Chan was the first person she worked with after arriving in Hong Kong, when the future international star appeared with him in a television commercial in 1984. At the time, Chan was already an established action performer. Yeoh was a former ballet student and newly crowned Miss Malaysia whose movie career had barely begun.

Eight years later, the two would meet again under dramatically different circumstances.

By then, Yeoh had become an action star, walked away from acting altogether, and reached a point where her movie career could easily have remained in the past.

Instead, she returned opposite Chan in Police Story 3: Supercop.

And rather than quietly easing herself back onto the screen, she performed some of the most dangerous and memorable stunts of her career.

Their First Meeting Wasn’t on a Movie Set

Yeoh’s path into Hong Kong cinema was almost accidental.

Born in Ipoh, Malaysia, she had trained in ballet and studied at London’s Royal Academy of Dance before an injury disrupted her hopes of pursuing dance professionally. She later won Miss Malaysia in 1983.

Not long afterward, a friend contacted her about an opportunity in Hong Kong. Businessman and film producer Dickson Poon was searching for women to appear in television advertising with famous male stars.

Yeoh flew to Hong Kong, met Poon and was soon placed in front of a camera with Jackie Chan.

Looking back decades later, she described Chan as “the first person I worked with in Hong Kong.”

The 1984 Guy Laroche watch commercial may have seemed like a small assignment, but it helped open the door to D&B Films and the Hong Kong movie industry.

Yeoh’s background was unusual for an aspiring action performer. She was not a formally trained martial artist. What she did understand was movement.

Her years of dance training had taught her timing, balance, flexibility and choreography. When she watched stunt performers working, she began to recognize similarities between their movements and dance.

She wanted in.

She Had to Prove a Beauty Queen Could Fight

Yeoh moved quickly from small screen roles into action.

Her breakthrough came with Yes, Madam! in 1985, in which she played a police inspector alongside martial artist Cynthia Rothrock. The movie helped establish Yeoh as a physical performer capable of doing demanding fight choreography and many of her own stunts.

But entering Hong Kong’s action industry as a former beauty queen meant she had something to prove.

Yeoh later described arriving at gyms where male stunt performers would watch skeptically as she attempted to follow their routines. She trained relentlessly, translating skills developed through dance and athletics into screen combat.

More action films followed, including Royal Warriors and Magnificent Warriors.

Then, just as Yeoh had established herself as one of Hong Kong cinema’s most unusual new action stars, she stopped.

At the Height of Her Rise, She Walked Away

Yeoh married Dickson Poon in 1988 and stepped away from acting.

Years later, she explained that she had viewed marriage as something that deserved her full commitment. Traveling constantly and performing dangerous stunts did not seem compatible with the life she was trying to build.

For roughly four years, audiences did not see Michelle Yeoh starring in new action movies.

In an industry capable of moving extremely quickly from one star to another, four years was a significant absence.

Yeoh and Poon divorced in 1992.

That same year, she made her return.

And the man standing beside her was Jackie Chan.

Eight Years Later, Jackie Chan Was No Longer Just the Star Beside Her

Police Story 3: Supercop, directed by Stanley Tong, paired Chan’s Hong Kong police officer with Yeoh’s mainland Chinese officer, commonly known in international versions as Jessica Yang.

It was part of Chan’s enormously successful Police Story series, which meant Yeoh was returning to acting inside a franchise closely identified with one of the world’s most fearless action stars.

She could have played it safely.

She did the opposite.

One sequence required Yeoh to race a motorcycle alongside a moving train, accelerate toward an embankment and launch the bike onto the train.

She did the stunt herself.

In another sequence, she moved between speeding vehicles. The film’s action became a showcase not simply for Chan, but for two performers seemingly determined to keep raising the physical stakes.

Years later, Yeoh remembered feeling “invincible” during the production. She also recalled Chan asking her to stop performing such extreme stunts. Her response was essentially that he was hardly in a position to lecture anyone about danger.

Chan’s explanation, she said, was that whenever she performed something extraordinary, he felt pressure to go even further.

The Academy later described the pair as having competitive personalities that inspired increasingly elaborate stunts while making the film.

That competition created something unusual.

Yeoh was not being presented merely as the woman standing next to Jackie Chan. She was being allowed to challenge him physically on screen.

Supercop Did More Than Bring Her Back

The importance of Supercop was not simply that Yeoh returned to acting.

It demonstrated that audiences and filmmakers could still accept her immediately as a major action star after years away.

Film writer and New York Asian Film Festival co-founder Grady Hendrix later noted that Yeoh’s comeback placed her in a succession of high-profile projects and helped position her as a genuine movie star rather than someone attempting to rebuild from the bottom.

The momentum was remarkable.

In 1993, Yeoh’s Supercop character received her own spin-off, usually known internationally as Supercop 2 or Project S. She also appeared in The Heroic Trio, followed by films including Tai Chi Master and Wing Chun.

By 1997, she had crossed into one of Western cinema’s biggest franchises, playing Chinese intelligence agent Wai Lin opposite Pierce Brosnan in Tomorrow Never Dies.

Unlike many traditional Bond women, Wai Lin was designed as an operative who could fight beside 007 rather than simply be rescued by him.

Then came Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Memoirs of a Geisha, Crazy Rich Asians, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and, eventually, Everything Everywhere All at Once.

In March 2023, Yeoh won the Academy Award for Best Actress for playing Evelyn Wang in that film.

Jackie Chan Appeared at Two Very Different Beginnings

Looking back, the symmetry is difficult to miss.

Jackie Chan was there near the beginning, when Yeoh arrived in Hong Kong and stood beside him for a commercial without knowing where the opportunity would lead.

Then he was there again eight years later, when she needed a second beginning.

The difference was that the woman returning in Supercop no longer needed an introduction.

She could race beside Chan, fight beside him and, occasionally, make one of cinema’s most fearless stunt performers wonder how he was going to top what she had just done.

The 1984 commercial opened a door.

Their 1992 reunion showed exactly what Michelle Yeoh had become after walking through it.