Chloe Bennet is back in action for the most exciting new on streaming series to binge this week: Interior Chinatown. In between Its clever social commentary on stereotypes in media and hilarious comedic moments with Jimmy O. Yang and Ronny Chieng, there are also some awesome fight sequences in the new TV show available to watch with a Hulu subscription. As Bennet told CinemaBlend, after her experience on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D that had fans hoping for a spinoff, she was content to not be part of them.
Bennet famously put the work in on ABC’s Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D., which ended after seven seasons back in 2020 with a fantastic series finale. The actress learned kickboxing, boxing, krav maga and jiujutsu to embody Daisy Johnson/Quake, who went on to lead the Inhumans, and has sustained multiple injuries while working as an actor. When I asked Bennet whether she gets in on the stunt action in Interior Chinatown, here’s how she responded:
I feel like I was so happy to not do any of it, actually. I'm still aching from [Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.]. My body hurts. I'm old and decrepit, and I'm happy to have watched them enjoy fighting. I am in pain.
While I wouldn’t consider 32 old and decrepit, she certainly deserves the right to take the bench after fronting a Marvel series for seven years. While filming the second season, a 23-year-old Bennet once told IGN how she broke her arm while rehearsing a fight scene and kept going to “not let” her stunt double do “as much as she should.” It’s seriously an impressive badge of honor that Bennet can say how much of the stunts on the ABC show were done by her, but this series, where she plays a detective named Lana Lee, did not call for her to fight, and she was A-OK with that.
That being said, she gave major props to her co-stars for doing their own stunts. Interior Chinatown’s lead, Jimmy O. Yang, shared with CinemaBlend how much he prepared for a big fight scene early in the show, and had this to say:
I made sure I trained like really hard for like three months leading up to it. So I hit the wooden dummy and everything. I learned all the language so that was all me. And the fight was on me too. It was my first time doing that. It was like pretty rewarding. We mixed in a lot of different martial arts disciplines, but even within that fight in the pilot, there's such a story, right? Like you almost expect this hero, the lead of the show was to win this fight, but he doesn't because he's just, someone stuck in the background of Chinatown. The background guy doesn't win the fight, you know? So even within that fight, we told such a story with the physicality of it. So, I thought that was pretty cool.
In the latest of book adaptations, Yang plays Willis Wu, a waiter who is working at a Chinese restaurant in the background of a cop show called Black & White. Not long after he realizes he is nothing but a background character in a larger story, he starts to become part of his own story when he witnesses a woman getting kidnapped. A fellow waiter and friend of his, Fatty Choi, is played by Ronny Chieng, who worked on action scenes with Yang. As he told us:
I am glad I got some in. I was glad to be a part of it. It was super fun. We were in that restaurant fighting for what felt like a week. We're throwing plates, dishes, we're all training, we're practicing all these moves that ended up getting cut. I got all these bruises from stuff that they didn't even use. One time me and Jimmy broke through a wall and they ended up not using it at all, so.
Chloe Bennet added to Chieng’s comments, saying that “most” stunts actually get cut. She’s quite the veteran! Lucky for her, she doesn’t need to lay a finger on anyone to steal her scenes, and Yang and Chieng had the chance to shine with their stunt work. Interior Chinatown is now streaming on Hulu.
