‘Life is like a heartbeat. It’s up and down, up and down’: Michelle Yeoh on casting cliches, marriage at 60 and playing a robot in Blade Runner 2099

Ballet dancer, action hero, Bond girl ... The actor won an Oscar for Everything Everywhere All At Once but she’s been through some challenges on the way

Before agreeing to appear in Blade Runner 2099, Michelle Yeoh received a letter – “an amazing letter, a love letter” – from Silka Luisa, the project’s creator, imploring her to be involved. Yeoh, who is 64, has played grandes dames, action heroes and a low-income Chinese-American battling the tax authorities in an infinite multiverse, but Blade Runner was different. The sci-fi series, a follow-up of sorts to Ridley Scott’s 1982 movie classic and its 2017 sequel, features both humans and replicants, their bioengineered antagonists, and Yeoh was adamant: “I don’t want to be human.” After working on ideas of what a synthetic human might look like, the result is Olwen, a terrifying individual with “a very cold, steely look in her eyes. And the way she moves – it’s not robotic. She’s sort of fluid. Like a dragon. Like a serpent.”

Yeoh is an actor who likes to figure things out for herself and, in the prep stages for Blade Runner 2099, the key question she thought about while building her character was, “What is it to be human? Are you born with humanity or does it come from the things you go through?”