Wolf Warrior 2's Celina Jade: 'I don’t think it was in anybody’s expectations it would do that well'

If you add up the numbers for her latest film, Chinese-American movie actress Celina Jade can justifiably claim that she is currently one of the biggest movie stars in the world. You may not have seen Wolf Warrior 2 but over a 100 million other people have. An action movie in the Rambo vein, directed by and starring Wu Jing and with the tag line “Whoever offends the Chinese will be wiped out no matter how far away,” it is reckoned to have grossed around $800 million in China alone. This is, by a distance, the country’s biggest grossing film ever.

Wolf Warrior 2 is an explosive yarn about a Chinese Special Forces agent Leng Feng (Wu Jing) caught in the middle of an African revolution. As if the guns weren’t enough, there’s a disease killing the locals too. Jade plays the courageous UN doctor, Rachel, desperately trying to find an antidote for the deadly virus as the Chinese soldiers take on the evil western mercenaries. Leng Feng and Rachel decide to risk their lives for the people and fight their war - naturally, she also becomes Wu Jing's character's love interest. After the film’s release Jade was signed up by US talent agency CAA and described in the trade press as “one of the most visible new faces in China.”

“I don’t think it was in anybody’s expectations it would do that well,” Jade reflects on the seismic impact of the film on the Chinese box office.

Wolf Warrior 2 came out in China on 27 July at 8.01 pm precisely to celebrate the founding of the People’s Liberation Army in the summer of 1927. She and Wu Jing went on a road tour to promote Wolf Warrior, visiting between 8 and eleven cinemas a day. As she travelled across country, the 32-year-old actress knew Wolf Warrior was doing well but she had no idea quite what a phenomenon it had turned into. That’s why she was so startled when she went back to Hong Kong (where she lives) on a two day break to relax and do her laundry. The movie hadn’t yet been released in Hong Kong and she was looking forward to rest and relaxation in blissful anonymity.

Jade went to get a coffee in her flip flops, short and t-shirt when all of a sudden, she heard people calling, using her Chinese name. “I thought that’s weird because people in Hong Kong call me Celina.” She turned around to be confronted by some visitors from mainland China who’d seen the film. They asked for autographs and photos. That was unsettling enough but when she rejoined the promotional tour, there was a mob waiting for her at Beijing airport.

“People would come upon with their phones and they would shoot you without asking.” Jade remembers. She told them that she wasn’t an animal in the zoo. All they needed to do was ask politely and she would happily pose with them. They were happy with that response but the crowd around her grew and grew. “I literally went into the toilet and hid,” she says “I don’t want to say ‘no’ to photos but I needed to catch my flight and it was overwhelming. I was travelling alone.” That was the moment Jade realised that, in China at least, she was a very big star indeed. By her calculations, by the time I met her in Venice in late August, 140 million people had seen Wolf Warrior. That’s one in 10 of the entire Chinese population of just under 1.4 billion.

Petite and elegant, Jade nonetheless knows how to kick ass. She is the daughter of the US kung fu star Roy Horan, the so-called “lord of the super-kickers” who worked with Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan among others, and she has studied martial arts from her earliest youth.

Jade also excelled academically. “I had a total tiger mum. She was the mum who put me in guitar classes, dancing classes, painting, mathematics and tutoring from a very early age.” She remembers her mother once getting cross because Jade only managed 98% in an exam. “Where did the other two marks go?” the mother asked.

Ironically, when Jade later found her mother’s own report cards from high school, she discovered that they were “very average.”

Jade’s father is known as a martial artist but he later became a neuroscience expert and Arctic explorer. “He basically studied the effects of meditation on the brain but also on a person’s creativity.”

Growing up in Hong Kong, she recalls being traumatised by watching her father’s films. She didn’t like seeing him being killed on screen.

At school in Hong Kong, Jade was bullied…but not for long. She and her sister were teased because they were mixed race.

“Back in those days, we weren’t called ‘mixed.’ We were called ‘bastard kids.’”

When they came home crying, their mother would recommend going to see the Principal but the father’a advice was altogether more practical. “Kick them in the stomach,’ he suggested was by far the best way of dealing with their tormentors. “There will be no bruising and they will never touch you again.”

Jade would also use her father’s BB gun to shoot coca cola cans which were being drunk by the bullies. Unsurprisingly, the bullying didn’t last.

When Jade was 14, she went to live with her aunt in New Jersey. “I found it extremely boring. I was in a place called Lawrenceville. There was just cows and grass. I was a very rebellious young teenager."

She didn’t take drugs herself but saw the effect they had on those around her. To alleviate the boredom, she also began to study yet harder.

Jade’s original ambition was to become a singer-songwriter. She studied management at the London School of Economics, where she got a first class degree. “That might not seem very logical,” she says of the decision to attend the LSE. However, having released her first album as a 15 year old, she realised quickly that music was a “business.”

“If you want to have control over your career, it’s important to have an education and understand the structure of the business and how things work,” Jade explains. That’s why she ended up living in halls in Southwark (“just across from Tate Modern”), then in a flat in Marble Arch next to the Odeon (“I remember wearing my PJs and going to watch movies”), then in Southampton Row and then Covent Garden and finally Chelsea.

After graduating from LSE, Jade went back to Hong Kong. She was talent spotted by Wu Jing, who persuaded her to take a stab at acting in Legendary Assassin. Now, a decade later, she has achieved numbers that it would take Hollywood stars an entire career to match.

She still has one foot in the east and one in the west. While Chinese audiences now know her for Wolf Warrior, she is recognised more in America for her role in TV superhero series Arrow.

Yes, there is likely to be a Wolf Warrior 3. “Everything is up in the air. Wu Jing probably needs time to relax and feel inspired to move forward with that. It is going to be a lot of pressure for him. If it was me, I’d just say let’s end on a high point but knowing Wu Jing and his personality, he will probably go for it.”

As for Jade herself, she is determined to use her “fame and recognition for a cause.”

“I think as a woman, I have a responsibility to play roles that have complexity and that can reflect the modern female,” Jade declares, making it very clear that she simply won’t accept the stereotypical roles that Hollywood tends to offer Asian actresses. “We don’t play decorative roles in society and so why should I play a decorative role in a movie. It is a time for me to challenge myself. I don’t want to be pigeonholed into being the martial arts actress…being able to fight is a skill set. Being able to sing and dance is also a skillset. I am not going to lessen the integrity of my role just to show people I can fight!”

She is soon to be seen in another 'ass-kicking role' in English language action movie Triple Threat and that she was cast in A Sweet Life, a Chinese drama. She also recently appeared in US indie drama April Flowers alongside Keir Dullea from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Jade’s final words are advice for the US studios as they scramble to tap into the Chinese market in a year when North American box office is dipping. “Asian audiences don’t want to see stereotypical, cliched roles. Hollywood needs to wake up and say look, if we want to tap into that market, we need just as good characters and material (as in US studio pictures.)”

'Wolf Warrior 2' is on release now