Donnie Yen Redesigned His JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 4 Character After Bruce Lee and Fought Against Asian Stereotypes

Donnie Yen is set to co-star in John Wick: Chapter 4 and fans are super excited about the fight scenes that he shares with Keanu Reeves. Just the fact that Yen is in this movie makes me believe that this is going to be the best movie in the franchise! I just don’t see how it can’t be with the elevated action that Yen’s involvement is going to bring.

During a recent interview with GQ magazine, Yen talked about his character in the film, who is named Caine, and explained that as he called out the Asian stereotypes in the original script, he was able to redesign the character the way he wanted, and he patterned the character after Bruce Lee. Yen said:

“The name was Shang or Chang. Why does he always have to be called Shang or Chang? Why can’t he have a normal name? Why do you have to be so generic? Then the wardrobe again — oh, mandarin collars. Why is everything so generic? This is a ‘John Wick’ movie. Everybody’s supposed to be cool and fashionable. Why can’t he look cool and fashionable?”

It’s explained that John Wick: Chapter 4 director Chad Stahelski was open to Yen and listened to his criticisms and agreed to modify the character. The modifications made ended up paying homage to Bruce Lee, and Yen maintained that he had “a very respectful experience working on John Wick,” and added, “Overall, I enjoyed making the film.”

This wasn’t the first time Yen had to deal with Asian stereotypes. When he jumped on board Disney and Lucasfilm’s Rogue One to play the blind warrior Chirrut Îmwe, he fought against some of the original details regarding that character as well. He said: “One thing I pointed out is he was a stereotype. So, the script was changed to make the character more fun and have some comedic beats. Yen was even given the opportunity to improvise jokes during filming.

Chad Stahelski recently teased a sequence between Reeves and Yen saying that they wanted to do something that we haven’t seen before:

“So, it always comes down to, I can do the Donnie Yen triple kick. I can do all this, but you also want to do something different. So, you start sitting, you come at it from character, and you have a lot of discussions with the guys going, 'Okay, Donnie is amazing at this. Keanu is amazing at this. They're both great actors, so let's lean onto that, and let's do something we haven't seen before.

“So now, that Donnie Yen with a sword and a pistol and Keanu with a samurai sword and a couple of pistols and throwing an AR-15 and a glass mirror room with Japanese artifacts. And yeah, throw in a couple of dogs, and let's see what happens.”

And we’ll get to see what happens soon when the movie is released on March 24th, 2023.