Wu Yue 吴樾
By the time of his first screen roles, Wu Yue had already competed in wushu tournaments and graduated from the Central Academy of Drama. In early TV series he played Chen Zhen and Sun Wu-Kong, while Wilson Yip cast him in the action film Paradox and entrusted him with the role of a tai chi master in Ip Man 4. All the while, Wu Yue kept working in the theatre. In The Big House he lived through his character's life on stage in a single evening, from youth to deep old age, and in the stage version of Parasite he played the father of the Kim family.
Wu Yue was born on April 25, 1976, in Zhangjiakou, Hebei Province. A sickly child, at the age of five he was taken by his father to a private teacher of Xingyiquan. By Wu Yue's own recollection, he himself wanted to learn to fight after seeing Shaolin Temple and the TV series The Legendary Fok about Huo Yuan-Jia. Two years later his mentor sent him to train at a sports school. From Zhangjiakou Wu Yue made it into big-time sport, competed for the Ningxia team and won national competitions. In 1993 he was awarded the "Wu Ying" sports rank in wushu. He was especially good at Bajiquan. Wu Yue also practiced Taijiquan for many years, but in film this skill did not come in handy for him right away. Audiences will see him put it to use in Ip Man 4.
Wu Yue first tried to get into acting in 1996. He passed the entrance exams for the Beijing Film Academy, but the All-China Games were coming up, and he stayed with the sports team. A year later, at the entrance exams for the Central Academy of Drama, he scored the highest mark in his specialty. All that remained was to pass the exams in general subjects, which he had long barely studied. By his account, he had just under a month to prepare. Leaving Ningxia was not easy for him. He had settled in well with the team, while in Beijing he had to earn his own money for his studies. During lunch breaks Wu Yue gave wushu lessons to foreign students, and in the evenings he worked part-time as a host at a dance hall. For two years a scholarship helped him get by.
In his graduation production based on a play by Tsutomu Mizukami, Wu Yue played one of the leading roles. He was then accepted into the China Youth Art Theatre, and in time he became an actor of the National Theatre. One of Wu Yue's first notable television roles was Chen Zhen. In the series Jing Wu Ying Xiong Chen Zhen (2001) he was to play a hero audiences already knew well from the movies. This disciple of Huo Yuan-Jia had been played by Bruce Lee and Jet Li. In the series Secret of the Linked Cities (2004), based on a novel by Jin Yong, he was given the part of Di Yun. At first everyone else makes decisions for this simple-hearted young man, and his fighting skill does little to help him work out whom he can trust. The role demanded patience. Di Yun cannot bring himself to believe that those closest to him are capable of deceiving him, even when the audience no longer has any doubt of it.
Sun Wu-Kong was played by Wu Yue in Journey to the West (2012). His character had to move with a monkey's agility in any pose, while Wu Yue himself had to spend the whole day in makeup and prosthetics. The shoot took nine months. The actor said that after just three months he began having skin problems and that he could hardly get enough sleep during that period. He considered the experience an important one for himself as an actor. His physical training was enough to perform a movement, but he still had to convey Wu-Kong's mannerisms in it. In the same year, 2012, Wu Yue played three roles in a stage production inspired by The West Chamber. There too he used wushu, but now on stage, where the audience has time to watch how the actor moves from one role to another.
Wu Yue first met Wilson Yip in 2009 at the Shanghai International Film Festival. He had liked the first Ip Man and himself suggested to the director that he cast him in the second. Nothing came of it then. Several years later Yip cast him in the action film Paradox (2017). Wu Yue played a Thai inspector of Chinese descent who helps Louis Koo's character search for his daughter. While filming was under way in Thailand, Wu Yue's own daughter was born. He recalled one scene in which his character came with his pregnant wife for an ultrasound. Looking at the screen, the actor forgot for a moment that he was acting. Yip later said he liked how the scene turned out. After filming was over, the director told Wu Yue that he was going to make a fourth Ip Man film and offered him a role in it.
In Ip Man 4 (2019), Wu Yue played Wan Zonghua, the head of the Chinese community in San Francisco. Wan is unhappy that Bruce Lee is teaching Chinese martial arts to Americans, and he takes issue with Bruce Lee's teacher. Preparing for the role, Wu Yue read about the lives of Chinese laborers in America and gave Wan a Beijing accent. He also found a tai chi teacher with whom he worked through the techniques of the Wu school and how they were once applied in combat. He recorded several moves on video and sent them to action director Yuen Wo-Ping. In the scene where Wan faces off against Donnie Yen's character, the actors had to combine two very different fighting styles. Wu Yue recalled that in the time tai chi takes for a single push or a dodge, Yen could land several Wing Chun strikes. The first days went into finding how to shoot the fight, and the entire scene, dialogue included, took about ten days. Wan has his share of troubles at home, too. He is certain he knows better than his daughter what she should do with her life, while sometimes what matters far more to her is that he listen to her than that he defeat an opponent.
On stage, by that time Wu Yue had been playing Bai Jingqi in "The Grand Mansion" for several years. In the production, which the National Theatre revived in 2016, his character travels from age eighteen to eighty-six over three hours. Wu Yue said that roughly every fifteen years of the character's life he slightly changes his intonation and the pace of his speech. As the actor himself grew older, his performance changed too. In one scene, Bai Jingqi demands that his mother hand over her child for a time. Wu Yue used to deliver the line as an order, but once he had a daughter of his own, he began to say it more gently. It seemed to him that at that moment Bai himself is not sure he will be able to get the child back as he promises.
In 2024, Wu Yue played Kim Ki-taek in the stage version of "Parasite," which Yang Ting directed based on Bong Joon-ho's film. He said he wanted to preserve Kim's ability to make his family laugh, while around the wealthy employers he had to become cautious and constrained. In the theater, that difference has to be conveyed through pause, voice and movement. From the back rows you can no longer make out the face of a silent actor. By then Wu Yue also had a small troupe of his own, where young actors could try their hand. Its first production came out in 2023. In film, Wu Yue produced the 2024 action movie Blocking the Horse, based on the opera about the Yang family, and played General Yang Ye in it. The venture, according to Wu Yue, grew out of a long-standing desire to work with operatic material and see what could be carried over from it into an action film.
