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Brad Falchuk and Byron Wu’s dream when creating The Brothers Sun was to cast Michelle Yeoh as Eileen “Mama” Sun, the matriarch in their new series about a Taiwanese American crime family putting itself back together. “It’s written for her, but not in a way that we thought was ever going to happen,” said Falchuk.
“When Brad Falchuk and Byron Wu put their heads together, they came up with this explosive, dark comedy, violent but fun and funny,” Yeoh told Netflix. “It is really a good story about family and what it takes to be family… and they take us on this incredible, crazy-ass ride.”
After falling in love with a “country boy” who rose to become one of the foremost gangsters in Taiwan, Eileen Sun made the choice to save at least one child from the family business while she had the chance. So she took her younger son, Bruce (Sam Song Li) with her to the San Gabriel Valley in Los Angeles and left her older son, Charles (Justin Chien), back in Taiwan with his father Big Sun (Johnny Kou), who groomed him into a deadly assassin. The role of Mama Sun required a “certain meekness with real strength behind it” in order to “secretly be the smartest, strongest person in the room all the time,” according to Falchuk. “You have to be extraordinary to pull that off. And so she’s that.”
Her sons’ journey of learning the full extent of their mother’s power was informed by Wu’s experience with his own mother, who was a development manager at Microsoft. “I thought she was just someone silly and to be embarrassed by, and then I found out she was actually feared and respected in her business,” he said. “I remember walking through her offices with my mom, and people were running into their offices to hide.”
While Yeoh praises the “brilliant chemistry” between her two boys, the up-and-coming actors couldn’t be more effusive about their on- (and off-) screen mentor taking them under her wing. “I remember the first time I got a text message from her. It popped up on my car’s screen, and it said, ‘Michelle Yeoh.’ I was like, ‘Holy shit, I just got a text from Michelle Yeoh,’ ” said Chien. “My biggest takeaway from her is that you can be an Oscar-winning actor and at the top of your game, and yet still be a kind, warm, nurturing, genuine person. I just think of her as my friend Michelle now.”
Li compares sharing a scene with her to playing basketball with Steph Curry or LeBron James. “You’re going to win every single basketball game that you play with them,” he said. “I’ve never seen the completeness of an actor the way that she brings it on set. She’s making our directors and showrunners laugh. But then the next second, when she has to be brought into a scene [that demands] a single teardrop coming down her face, she’s able to get it like that. It’s mind-blowing to witness in person.”
Yeoh is no stranger to playing fierce mothers willing to do anything to protect her cubs, even if they aren’t exactly cubs anymore. See her Oscar-winning turn as Evelyn in Everything Everywhere All at Once or her formidable performance as Eleanor in Crazy Rich Asians, to name a couple. But when she read Wu and Falchuk’s first few scripts, she was eager to explore a new genre for a shrewd mother to dominate — the underbelly of organized crime in the San Gabriel Valley region of Los Angeles. “We’ve not had a gangster-type movie. You have The Sopranos. Where’s our gangster-type movies?” she asked. “And when the action kicks into high gear, it’s just like, oh, my God,” she said. “That was one of the reasons why I wanted to do it. I haven’t really done a full-blown gangster movie in this way.”
She arrived at her first meeting with Falchuk, Wu, and director Kevin Tancharoen at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel armed with plenty of questions — three-and-a-half hours’ worth. “I felt really bad for the waitstaff because we ordered one coffee and then we just took up a huge table for so long,” said Wu.
She didn’t only ask questions about her character — “all brilliant,” said Falchuk. She also asked about the languages spoken in the series, which include Mandarin and Cantonese and helped come up with the exact right words. “It was a gift to have somebody like that around to do that,” said Falchuk. And that instinct to look after the entire production didn’t just stop on that initial meeting. “Michelle wanted the show to be better,” added Wu. “She came up with these great ideas… they were all very useful.”
Yeoh encouraged production to begin with a traditional Taiwanese ceremony to “pay respect to the space we’re entering because we’re creating a new world, effectively,” said Wu. She also loves to invite people to dinner and host gatherings. “She makes you feel like she’s your auntie in about five minutes,” said Tancharoen. Chien and Li were frequent guests of hers, which bled into their on-screen dynamic. “They were just a family,” he said. “They watched out for each other. She would give a little discipline if they ever needed to be, and when she snapped to it, they did, too. They were like, ‘OK, yup. Yes, mom. We’ll listen.’ ”
Yeoh particularly enjoyed being part of a group of amazing young actors — “Asian actors from Korea, from England, from Asia,” she said. But Wu is most grateful to Yeoh for commanding every actor on set to rise to the occasion just by her mere presence and professionalism. “To me, the most astounding thing was watching her nurture and mentor all these young actors and help them and honestly make them step up,” he said. “I’ll always appreciate that, what she did.”
Watch Michelle Yeoh as Mama Sun in The Brothers Sun now, only on Netflix.
