He married Shu Qi, has a bromance with Daniel Wu: how Hong Kong’s Stephen Fung went from singing to performing to discovering his true calling as a director

Whereas it isn’t unusual for Hollywood actors to change into writers, producers and even administrators, the phenomenon is comparatively uncommon in Hong Kong cinema.

Born in 1974 in Hong Kong, Fung is the son of Julie Sek Yin, a notable actress through the Shaw Brothers period within the Sixties. He made his performing debut at 16 after a trainer mentioned he ought to audition for the Warner Brothers’ tv movie, Forbidden Nights (1990).

He didn’t correctly start his performing profession there, nevertheless. His dad and mom made certain schooling got here first, and Fung went to the US to check graphic design on the College of Michigan, the place he did a movie elective. Round 1995, he returned to Hong Kong.

In 1996, he shaped the Cantopop group Dry with composer Mark Lui Chung-tak. Although they gained a handful of awards, the duo break up up in 1998 after their third studio album, as each singers’ respective movie and songwriting careers had been taking off.

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A number of years later, Fung mentioned in an interview that there was “no setting for a wholesome music trade in Hong Kong” with style range: “Audiences right here shouldn’t have tolerance for selection. You’ll by no means have a Weapons N’ Roses or Metallica right here. It’s all mass pop for karaoke, and the vary could be very slender.”

Fung was not totally glad with these roles. In a 2004 interview, he mentioned he was not “that keen on” his earlier roles. Because it seems, his ardour for movie was deeper than that.

Between 2001 and 2002, Fung spent a while in Los Angeles to survey the Hollywood scene, the place he was supplied principally stereotypical East Asian roles.

“I’m fairly nosy on set. I wish to go round and see what everyone seems to be getting as much as. So, it was a reasonably pure factor, turning into a director. That individual aspect simply type of grew,” Fung mentioned in 2005.

“The following 10 years are my golden years. I need to profit from them … I simply needed to return to the fundamentals of the outdated Hong Kong movies I grew up watching.”

“There was some extra confidence in me after my first movie,” mentioned Fung whereas making ready for his second movie, the kitschy martial arts comedy Home of Fury (2005). “Then I acquired Yuen Woo-ping concerned and that helped get me a bigger funds. Throughout a break from engaged on Kill Invoice he’d come to city and seen my first film and favored it.”

Fung’s profession continued to diversify. In 2006, he wrote, directed and starred in Stephen’s Diary, a sitcom-format drama sequence which clocked good rankings on TVB Jade.

In 2007, he was seen assembly with Hollywood massive names for potential movie tasks – there was Tom Cruise in Berlin and Brandon Routh, the then new Superman, in Beijing.

It was additionally the 12 months that he went by means of a serious life change, as he and Karen Mok, his girlfriend of 9 years, broke up. In response to queries, Fung mentioned: “We hadn’t been placing our relationship within the highlight after we had been relationship, why would we do it after we had been separated?”

Round 2012, Fung quietly started relationship Shu Qi, whom he had been associates with since they met on the set of Bishonen within the late Nineteen Nineties. The superstar couple married in a small, informal ceremony in Europe in 2016 and so they have stayed low-key ever since.

Though Hollywood couldn’t present him with the suitable alternatives within the early 2000s, it seems to be like Fung cast a brand new path for himself and acquired there anyway.