Touchstone/Courtesy Everett
Lucy Liu as Princess Pei Pei in ‘Shanghai Noon’
Lucy Liu needed to be rescued in Shanghai Noon. But behind the scenes, she was itching to learn some of the hero’s moves herself.
Seizing the opportunity to learn from an action superstar, Liu had asked her Shanghai Noon castmate Jackie Chan to teach her stunts. The Rush Hour actor, who had an entire stunt crew helping him, declined.
“He’s like, ‘No, no, no, you don’t get to do anything. I don’t want you to get hurt,'” Liu said in a video reviewing her “Life in Looks” for Vogue.
SGranitz/WireImage
Owen Wilson, Lucy Liu, and Jackie Chan during the ‘Shanghai Noon’ premiere
Instead, Chan’s team taught Liu how to juggle, which baffled her. She admitted she “wasn’t coordinated enough” to do it successfully, which may have been a sign of her readiness to take on more intense stunt work.
“Maybe that was their test to see if I could actually handle knives and other things,” Liu said.
Still, the Rosemead actress is no shrinking violet when it comes to stunts. Following the East-meets-West western comedy, she went on to wield some serious weapons in action franchises like Charlie’s Angels and Kill Bill.
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Touchstone/Courtesy Everett
Owen Wilson and Jackie Chan in ‘Shanghai Noon’
In fact, her role as Princess Pei Pei in Shanghai Noon is what led her to play assassin O-Ren Ishii in the Kill Bill films. Liu said Quentin Tarantino wrote the part for her after watching her performance in the 2000 western.
“He said, ‘Your role as Princess Pei Pei, like, it really moved me and it really connected me with you,'” Liu said.
The actress took Tarantino’s offer and even had a part in shaping her Kill Bill character’s look. She previously shared how she took inspiration from the simplicity of Vincent Vega’s (John Travolta) and Jules Winnfield’s (Samuel L. Jackson) crisp white shirts and black ties.
“For the first scene that you see O-Ren in, she’s in a black kimono with a white underneath the black kimono. And so that was representing, basically, Pulp Fiction,” Liu said in the same Vogue video.
Check out the full Vogue video with Lucy Liu below.
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