The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once has been praised as one of the greatest movies of the year. It’s both a wildly entertaining, delightfully imaginative, genre-bending sci-fi epic, and an intimate portrait of a family struggling to connect with one another. Above all, it’s a showcase for Michelle Yeoh’s phenomenal talent.

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Across her decades-spanning career, Yeoh has become a screen legend with a wide range of performances showing off her abilities as a comedian, a dramatic actor, and an action hero. The role of Evelyn Wang in Everything Everywhere All at Once allowed Yeoh to combine all those abilities into a single character.

Yeoh Gets To Show Off Her Entire Range

Michell Yeoh in Everything Everywhere All At Once

Evelyn is a deeply human dramatic role, a hilariously deadpan comedic role, a flawed romantic lead, and an action movie badass all rolled into one. With this role, Yeoh has finally been given the chance to show off the full range of her acting abilities within the same character.

Yeoh’s versatile lead performance is what makes the Daniels’ ambitious genre cocktail work so well. Whether Evelyn is having an explosive argument with her daughter or dryly reacting to multiversal exposition or pulling two “Auditor of the Year” awards out of people’s butts, Yeoh strikes the perfect tone and timing in every scene.

Evelyn Is Painfully Relatable

Evelyn smiling in Everything Everywhere All At Once.

Everybody can see themselves in Evelyn. She’s far from perfect, but she’s trying to be better. By the end of the movie, she has to learn to confront her flaws. She gives her husband the cold shoulder when she should be embracing his affection. She pushes her daughter away when she should be making amends with her. She resents her father for his actions years ago when she should be forgiving him.

This character’s flaws and foibles make her painfully relatable, and Yeoh fills the everywoman role brilliantly. The audience can identify the best and worst parts of themselves within Evelyn’s authentically complicated emotional characterization.

Yeoh Shares Great Chemistry With Stephanie Hsu As Both Her Daughter And The Villain Possessing Her Daughter

Michelle Yeoh in Everything Everywhere All At Once

Every great actor needs a great scene partner to really make their scenes pop, and Yeoh has two great scene partners in Stephanie Hsu. Hsu plays both Joy, Evelyn’s estranged daughter, and Jobu Tupaki, the evil multiversal entity that possesses Joy.

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As both the hero’s daughter and the villain, Hsu shares two separate but equally tangible on-screen dynamics with Yeoh. Their mother-daughter chemistry is delightfully authentic – even in their most heated arguments, there’s always a hidden undercurrent of love – and Hsu disappears into the superpowered sociopathy of Jobu Tupaki.

She Also Shares Great Chemistry With Ke Huy Quan As Every Variant Of Her Husband Waymond

Ke Huy Quan and Michelle Yeoh in Everything Everywhere All At Once

Ke Huy Quan gives an incredible performance alongside Yeoh as Evelyn’s optimistic husband Waymond and several of his variants. The two actors share heartbreakingly convincing chemistry as a married couple whose love is fading. At the beginning of the movie, Waymond presents Evelyn with divorce papers.

Throughout the movie, it becomes clear that the commonality among all universes is that Waymond is madly in love with Evelyn, but she’s always been emotionally distant – and she’s finally driven him away. Among many other things, Everything Everywhere All at Once is a poignant look at the struggles of long-term romance (and the need to keep the spark alive). Yeoh and Quan capture those themes beautifully.

Yeoh Brings The Perfect Blend Of Martial Arts Badassery And Physical Comedy To The Action Scenes

Evelyn in Everything Everywhere All at Once

According to CinemaBlend, the lead role in Everything Everywhere All at Once was originally written for Jackie Chan, the master of blending thrilling martial arts action with Buster Keaton-style physical humor. When Chan turned down the part, it was reworked to suit Yeoh’s equally iconic screen persona and she knocked the role out of the park.

In the movie’s deliriously entertaining action scenes, Yeoh proves she’s just as adept as Chan at combining genuinely impressive fight choreography with genuinely hilarious slapstick.

Evelyn Is All Of Yeoh’s Best Characters Rolled Into One

Michelle Yeoh in the midst of martial arts training in Everything Everywhere All at Once

With various multiversal variants, all with their own special abilities, Evelyn combines all the best qualities of Yeoh’s most iconic characters into one character.

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She’s both a comically domineering mother in the mold of Eleanor Sung-Young from Crazy Rich Asians and a badass warrior in the mold of Yu Shu Lien from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Yeoh even plays a movie star variant of Evelyn inspired by her own career.

Yeoh Takes The Audience Along On Evelyn’s Existential Journey

Michelle Yeoh with hot dog fingers in Everything Everywhere All at Once

Everything Everywhere All at Once follows Evelyn on an existential journey across the multiverse, verse-jumping in and out of various alternate lives and comparing them to her own. In other universes, Evelyn is everything from a famous singer to a renowned movie star. Naturally, the laundromat manager under audit by the IRS becomes jealous of her other selves.

Throughout the movie, Evelyn grows to resent the mundane life she leads and wonders what the point of it all is. Eventually, she learns to appreciate what she has. Yeoh takes the audience on every step of this powerful existential odyssey, conveying the motivation for every decision along the way.

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