by James Mottram
“I don’t plan,” shrugs Tony Leung. “If something interesting happens, then why not?” This may sound like a casual attitude to a career, but it certainly hasn’t harmed the ultra-cool Hong Kong star, whose forty years in the business has seen the 61-year-old feature in such renowned classics as In the Mood for Love and Infernal Affairs. “How I decide which movie to do? Just follow my heart,” he adds. “I don’t calculate. I just let things happen. Because you can’t plan how we live our life. We can have a goal, but we can’t plan… things might not happen the way you plan.”
Still, it was not a difficult decision to take on his new film The Goldfinger, a pulsating crime thriller inspired by true events. The movie reacquaints him with director Felix Chong (who co-wrote the first of the Infernal Affairs trilogy) as well as actor Andy Lau. Leung co-starred with Lau in Infernal Affairs, though their working relationship goes back forty years to when they co-starred in the 1984 TV drama The Duke of Mount Deer. “I think we’ve gotten a lot more mature over the years,” smiles Leung, “and of course, we built up more acting experience as well.”
While Leung and Lau have known each other for four decades, they rarely socialise outside of work, and are hardly what you might call a double act in the Jack Lemmon-Walter Matthau mould. The fact that they haven’t worked together for twenty years, since Infernal Affairs, shows that it has to be a special project for them to reunite. “We were waiting for that right opportunity,” says Leung. “We couldn’t just work together whenever we want to… we’re just waiting for the right chance.”
In The Goldfinger – primarily set in the 1980s – Leung plays Ching Yat-Yin, a flamboyant businessman in charge of a multi-billion empire, the Carmen Century Group. Due to wide-scale corruption from the top down, when the company collapses, it devastates stockholders’ lives. Aiming to bring down Ching is Lau’s character, Lau Kai-Yuen, Senior Investigator at the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC), an organisation formed in the 1970s.
“Actually, it’s similar to some real characters in the ’80s,” says Leung, “For me, after I read the script, I read a lot [about] the kind of con men in Wall Street. I talked to the director… I said, ‘This movie is something like a combination of American Hustle and The Wolf of Wall Street. But it really happened in Hong Kong’.”
For Leung, frequently cast as the leading man across his career, The Goldfinger was a rare opportunity to play the immoral villain. “I think it’s very challenging to me to play the bad guy. At this time, Andy is playing the good guy. So, twenty years after Infernal Affairs…” – when Leung was a cop and Lau was a crook, both undercover – “…we change our position with one another.”
This time, Leung is the brash one, his personality reflected in his loud sartorial choices. With the story jumping across time periods, it allowed for Leung to transform across the story. “As for the makeup, I had three different looks throughout the film,” he explains. “Two of them were done with wigs and there wasn’t any digital. Essentially, it was makeup and costume. There wasn’t any digital work.”
Certainly, if you think of Leung’s emotionally repressed characters from the past, Ching seems like a huge departure. “How I [was] brought up… I used to suppress all the feelings inside, I don’t show all my feelings in front of others,” he admits. “After I got into acting, I found a way to express myself in front of other people without being shy, because they don’t know that is me, they think I’m playing a character. So, I think that’s my style of acting. But that needs a lot of preparation.”
Leung’s style also comes from his early experiences on screen when he began to find himself working with impressive auteurs, like Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien on the 1989 war drama A City of Sadness, a film that propelled Leung onto the international scene when it went on to win Venice’s Golden Lion (the first of three films featuring Leung, the others being Tran Anh Hung’s Cyclo and Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution, that won the prize). “At that time, I couldn’t speak Mandarin. So, I played a mute. But still, I had to study a lot of books about the history of that period of time. And Hou Hsiao-Hsien was one of my mentors who inspired me a lot.”
Finally, after decades dominating Asian cinema, Leung is next set to work with Ildikó Enyedi, the Hungarian director of the prize-winning On Body and Soul. While Leung has ventured to Hollywood, recently featuring in the 2021 Marvel movie Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, he’s “never worked in a European film before” he reveals, somewhat surprisingly. “And I’m so lucky, I have the chance… I have no idea what will happen. But I’m sure this will be a very exciting journey. After I read some of the books provided by Ildikó, it really opened up my eyes.”
Set to be titled Silent Friend, the film sees Leung play a neuroscientist. “I have no idea about what neuroscience is!” he laughs. “So, I have to read a lot of books. And I have to go to a lot of university hopping. And now I know almost all neuroscientists and neurologists in Hong Kong, and have done a lot of research.” It was after he first met Enyedi over Zoom that he decided to take on the project. “She’s a very intellectual person, very humble, very down to earth… I was like ‘Wow. How can I say no?’ So, why not work together?” Now that sounds like a plan.
The Goldfinger is in cinemas on 30 December 2023
