Donnie Yen Looks Back On Playing Chirrut Imwe In ‘Rogue One’, Reveals How Much He Influenced The Character
I was thrilled, but at the same time I was kind of confused. Am I too damn old to take that role? I don’t know! So I actually asked my kids, ‘Do you think your father should do Star Wars? I mean, do you like Ip Man better or Star Wars better?’ And they said, ‘Star Wars, of course!’ So that changed my mind. That’s pretty much it.It looks like Rogue One fans owe Donnie Yen’s children a “thank you” for convincing him to accept the role of Chirrut Imwe. Had the star passed on the opportunity, it’s highly unlikely that Chirrut would have been portrayed as he was in the finished movie, as Yen had plenty of his own ideas for fleshing him out:
One of the creative conversations before I agreed to do it, I said, ‘You know, the role was a little bit too cliché…’ Because in the beginning the character was a little bit more serious. Then I said, ‘You know, you have enough of these kind of Asian martial arts masters. That’s fine. You know if you want me to play that, be that Asian master, you want me to swing that stick a little bit, that’s perfectly fine but shouldn’t he have a sense of humor?’ And he liked the idea, so we kind of added lines and made this character a little bit more funny.
Then I just kind of suggested, ‘Would it be even better if he can’t see? Where he can feel the Force… but then somehow he has a grasp of that universe?’
In all my films and all the characters that I’ve played in my entire career, I always emphasize on the realism of the character. No matter what genre I do, I always emphasize on interpreting this character. He has to be grounded, or else you’ll be off the wall and no one understands where you’re coming from. “So that’s how I approached the whole character, not just the action side. So maybe that worked. Maybe people really came to like this character so much.
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