Martial-Arts Action Hero Daniel Wu Balances East and West

Daniel Wu is a busy guy. Really busy.

For starters, there’s his work: a veteran of over 60 films. Daniel Wu stars in several per year, a career that takes him from Hong Kong to South Africa to Ireland to Louisiana and back again, often all in the space of a few short months.

Then there was his hit TV show Into the Badlands. In Badlands he not only played the lead role, but produced as well. And most recently his starring roles in the thriller: Caught in Time and in the dystopian love story Reminiscence where he stars alongside Hugh Jackman.

But, most importantly, there’s family: his supermodel wife Lisa S. and their daughter Raven.

“After doing it for a couple of decades, you figure out a way to balance it all together,” Wu says calmly when he talked to us from set in Cape Town, South Africa, where he was shooting the most recent iteration of the long-running Tomb Raider action-movie franchise.

While others might burn out with the busy schedule, Daniel Wu sounds unruffled by all the busy-ness of the film business. “The great thing about my job is that it’s very intense for a short period of time,” he says. “And then when you’re done, you can relax.”

It’s that constant balance between intensity and calm that defines not only what Wu does, but who he is. “If I had to keep a regular pace, like a steady job all the way through, I don’t know if I could handle that,” he says. “But I think short spurts like this are much more tolerable for me personally. I do enjoy working in this way. So, I may not see my family that much when I’m shooting, but then I’ll see them every day for three months, so I have some time between.”

The son of Mandarin-speaking parents who emigrated across the Pacific from Shanghai to San Francisco, Wu’s life has always been something of a balancing act: between two cultures, two languages, two worlds.

Even in his career, Daniel Wu has always been more than just an actor — he’s an actor who’s also a martial-arts expert, the natural successor to Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Jet Li, and Donnie Yen, a master of kicks and punches, a fantasy fighter tasked with creating the illusion of superhuman skill in every scene.

“I equate it to being a professional athlete,” Wu says. “It’s a very serious physical commitment. You do the acting preparation, but you also have this whole physical component where you have to get your body ready for the shoot, and then be able to endure the entire length of the shoot.”

It’s this training that Daniel Wu credits with helping him maintain his balance through the turbulence that naturally accompanies life in the spotlight. “I believe martial arts training has made me the person I am,” he says. “The ability to persevere, endure through things, to push back on things. When you’re in a ring sparring with someone, and your back is in a corner, and it’s just you and him, you have to figure out a way to get out of it. So, if you’re facing adversity at work, or adversity in life, those lessons help.”

With that mentality, it’s somewhat surprising to hear that Wu’s career was as much about being in the right place at the right time as it was about hard work and determination.

“When I [first] went to Hong Kong, I wasn’t expecting to stay that long,” he says. “It was a college graduation trip. I was going to travel around for two or three months and then head back home and look for a job. The movie business found me while I was there and I never left.”

Now, however, Daniel Wu feels his life is less about East or West, and more about East and West. “My mom always used to say, ‘You’re a person of the world,’” he says. “I feel I can go anywhere and get along with any culture because I respect other cultures. It’s not just an East-West thing. I think the East-West thing made me find a balance in life, but it made me realize how beautiful this world is, and how beautiful other cultures and peoples are, and I wanted to go out and explore and absorb it.”

Indeed, much of Wu’s work can be viewed as a kind of reflection of a central idea. He feels that if you take the best of East and West, China and America, drama and action, English and Mandarin, you can blend it into something fresh, new, and completely engrossing.

Case in point: Into the Badlands where Wu plays Sunny, a reluctant martial-arts assassin who’s the deadliest killer in a world chock full of assassins. “It’s meant to be a mashup of different kinds of cult genres,” Wu says. Among the most obvious: steampunk, sci-fi, post-apocalyptic Mad Max-style worlds, a smorgasbord of martial arts from various parts of Asia. There’s even a dash of horror now and then — just enough to keep the audience wondering what’s going to happen next.

“It’s a very difficult balance,” Wu says. “[But] it’s all kind of seamless — it flows really perfectly into all these different things so; it’s constantly changing and morphing. And that was one of our goals for the show, to try and take all those elements, to push the envelope with it, and create our own genre.”

Creating something of his own has become a lot more important lately as Wu enjoys fatherhood and family life. “That’s the most important priority for me, making sure they’re all good. Being a father [became] the most important thing to me and the career took a back seat for the first time in my life.”

As a result, balance has taken on a new definition. “I’ve calmed down with age, and also with having a kid,” Wu says. “I’ve realized you have to enjoy life and be in the moment. I’m just kind of organically letting life come to me and when the right time comes and it feels right, I’ll go for it. But I’m not trying to plan or predict the path anymore.”