With Warrior out on Netflix, I spoke with the Hop Wei tong’s Ah Sahm, Young Jun, and Hong (Andrew Koji, Jason Tobin, and Chen Tang).
Neil Bui: The world is a different place now in 2024 compared to when the filming of Warrior started in 2017 to when it first aired in 2019. From the lens of your characters and their arcs throughout the series, what themes do you feel are still relevant now more than ever?
Jason Tobin: It’s almost like things change and then nothing changes at all right? Because this show takes place in the late 1800s. It was conceptualized by a man who died 50 years ago and from when we started filming season 1 till now, we’ve gone through pandemics and all kinds of upheaval and polarization. It’s almost like nothing has changed and so it’s as relevant as ever. I don’t know what that all means. It’s uncanny that it’s still relevant. It’s weird, it stands the test of time for better or worse. I don’t know the deeper meaning of it, that’s just the way life goes, the yin and yang of it.
Chen Tang: For me as Hong, it was very simple. Looking for belonging, in all ways, in a Chinese way, Asian way, a family way, sexuality way. Just love. Looking for belonging, that’s pretty universal.
Andrew Koji: [Showrunner] Jonathan Tropper always writes a lot about family and trying to find where you belong. Ah Sahm has been looking for his family and he’s starting to navigate in a world which is not really primed for his kind of people to thrive. It’s about finding a home. I’m going to reverse the question and I’m going to take it to eleventy. We’re finding a home and we found a home on Netflix. And what you got to do right, what you gotta do is you got to watch the whole thing to completion, you need the completion if you guys want season four. If you do that within the first week and two weeks, we’re going to most likely get a season four and then we’ll have found a home. That’s how I’m flipping that!
Jason Tobin: I just had this thought. After season two, we ended the show with such a high. We left Cape Town where we filmed Warrior at the end of season two, really buzzed thinking like ‘oh man six, seven months from now we’re going to be back shooting season three.’ Of course, the polar opposite happened. We got canceled, and then six months later there was a global pandemic. We all lived through that trauma and when we were green lit again for season three, we came back with all the baggage of having gone through a pandemic and I don’t even need to explain that to you. We all lived through it. So in a way, season two ended with that Chinatown riot, and the heaviness of that so in so many ways the pandemic and what we went through as people kind of helped our acting so to speak. It had the same kind of resonance of what it must have felt like for people in Chinatown to be scapegoated, to be accused of spreading diseases, to have your homes and businesses destroyed. In acting, we talk about substitution of feelings and memories, but here we are. We lived it, so you can feel it in season three, we’re different people and it helped in the performances.
1 comment
All three seasons of Warrior were great. Looking forward for Season 4!.