Celebrity Life

Fung shares all of this while he’s sitting in hair and make-up on a workday, prepping for our cover shoot. There’s an easy rapport, and his amiability carries over to crew members outside of his own team, as if we’ve all known one another forever.

Of course, most people have known Fung forever. Hong Kong audiences first met the son of famed local actress Julie Sek Yin in 1997 as a heartthrob singer in the two-man band Dry. The experience was that of a fish out of water for the international-school-educated, University of Michigan graduate whose music idols growing up were Alice Cooper and Iron Maiden.

“At the time, Hong Kong pop culture was similar to the West actually,” he says, “where they were into boy bands who wore a lot of make-up and danced. I’m totally anti that. I was into heavy metal in high school so it was a bit of shock, having to do things like wear a mascot costume at Ocean Park.”

After a year, Fung decided he was more suited to acting and segued into what became a successful career in front of the camera, working with the best of the Hong Kong film industry in its heyday, actors like Andy Lau, Faye Wong, Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Jackie Chan and Eason Chan (Fung also met his now wife, Taiwanese-born actress Shu Qi, on the set of the 1998 Hong Kong drama Bishonen). “I realised I wanted to venture into film,” he explains. “Because when your job is to play someone else, you can actually be yourself.”

From there, Fung transitioned to directing because, as he puts it, “I think I’m a bit of a control freak. I don’t like it when people tell me I have to do this or do that, and eventually I felt that I also have stories I want to tell, so I went into directing. It’s where I can just do my thing.”

The decision paid off. Having first started in Hong Kong with Enter the Phoenix, a movie for which he also wrote the screenplay, Fung made his way to Hollywood, directing two episodes of AMC’s Into the Badlands in 2015 with friend and erstwhile co-star Daniel Wu as lead – the first Asian lead in an American television series in 40 years. Fung’s directorial efforts were noticed by showrunner and producer John Wirth, who happened to have written Wu Assassins, a project slated as Netflix’s first martial-arts series.

“My agents told me someone was looking for a director for a job called Wu Assassins,” Fung recounts. “They sent me the script but when I first looked it over I was a bit hesitant because there are lots of elements in there that I felt were really stereotypical Asian-type stuff. Then when I spoke to John, he was very open-minded and expressed that that was why he wanted to find someone who would be sensitive to and familiar with the material.”