Now that all three seasons of Warrior are available for streaming on Netflix, Dorkaholics spoke with members of the cast, Hoon Lee, Kieran Bew, and Tom Weston-Jones to talk about their characters, Wang Chao, Bill O’Hara, and Richard Lee.
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?
Hoon Lee: We’re dealing with a story that’s set in the late 19th century, written by a person in the mid-20th century, finally coming to light in the 21st century. We are never going to get past these issues, we can just try to progress them, try to evolve them. So in the span of the past three years, when you look at the larger historical context, this is a bump in the road. Whatever we’re dealing with now is something we’ve dealt with in the past. I take great comfort in that in a way. It’s easy to look back at history and some of the things that we drew from real history like the 1871 lynching in LA. It’s easy to look back at those things in despair and say things don’t change, but things do change. It’s just a reminder that we have to be continually working on it and continually vigilant towards the things that threaten our ability to view each other as human beings. So I find it incredibly inspirational that we are wrestling with the exact same problems, knowing that we’re going to continue to do that and hopefully do it with greater numbers of allies, in this case people who watch the show and our fellow dorks all across the land.
Kieran Bew: In the context of Bill within the show, his idea and his philosophy is to try and keep an equilibrium on things and understand that people are going to fuck up and they’re going to make mistakes, but you’ve got to try and work together in order to maintain an equilibrium that isn’t going to spill into something that’s worse. He doesn’t necessarily intend to go on any kind of personal journey or have any kind of epiphany. I think he definitely does learn some stuff about himself and his attitudes within the show but he isn’t necessarily prepared to become Lee for instance. He’s working within the social norms of the times and he’s trying to survive and he’s trying to keep himself alive and afloat. And I don’t think he’s necessarily trying to affect change on that scale. By the end of season 3 and if we did go into season 4, I think he does aspire to try to do better and he is about to do that. But whether he succeeds or not, we will have to find out if everybody watches the show and binge watches and tells their grands and family to watch it and thumbs it up, and we might get to come back and we’d like to.
Tom Weston-Jones: So the guy’s on the run, and joins the police force. He’s trying to keep his head down and he joins the police force. It’s obviously poking a hole for fun, but actually it’s a shot at redemption. It’s trying to make peace with a hell of an experience that he’s going to have to carry and carries throughout seasons one, two, and three, and resolves in himself one way or another for anyone who hasn’t seen the show yet. The brutality that he is a part of really just by carrying the badge, it weighs on him hugely. What I really enjoyed was chipping away at Bill over time to share a bit of that over time. What Kieran does so well is playing the moments where Bill is trying to deny his emotions and I think the one person that is pretty good at opening that door is Lee. I liked pushing those buttons and sharing the load.
