Interview with Donnie Yen from Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

We are only days away from, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story being in theaters on December 16th! I had such a fantastic time last week at Skywalker Ranch and Lucasfilm HQ where we were able to interview the cast and director of Rogue One including Donnie Yen, who plays Chirrut Îmwe.

Chirrut Imwe

Donnie started by telling us a bit about his character, “Chirrut, he’s blind but he’s spiritual. Kathy Kennedy described it – he’s the spiritual center of the team. He’s the Force believer. He preaches this and he’s got a little bit of a sense of humor. Yeah, he beats up all the Storm Troopers.”

Donnie also revealed that his character wasn’t originally blind, revealing, “I don’t want to take any credit…I think it’s the collaboration of both. That’s the nature of being an artist. You express your take on your character. So in the beginning when I was discussing about my character with Gareth and I just felt it would be so much cooler to make him less of a cliché character, a warrior monk, you know.

How serious is that, right? How about give him a little bit of vulnerability, you know, like disabledness. How about being blind? And a little bit sense of humor? That was always been my persistence of keeping him grounded, having that sense of humor so the audience can relate to him a lot more. I suggested it and he’s cool with it and Disney loved it and here we are.”

Martial Arts Master

Donnie Yen is known for his martial arts moves and has a huge fan base. He shared a little bit about the challenges of being blind and doing martial arts on Rogue One.

“I’ve been in business for quite a while, uh, 70 movies, right? A lot of audience, my fans in particularly, I have different set of fans. Straight action fans and Donnie Yen fans. But without realizing the changes of every film in the past decade of my films. It wasn’t so much of what I’m gonna do with my body each time, but different characters that I try to take on. I mean, I’ve done, beside action movies, I’ve done comedies, romantic, all kinds of tryout. I played a monkey king where I insist on not recognizing my face. I just wanted to take challenges as an actor.

I don’t look at myself as oh, this is this guy who does really good, you know, he specialize in the action field. Right? But I wanted to be perceived as a good actor and striving to be a better actor each time. Being blind, I never played a blind person before. That was another reason why I wanted to do something completely different, challenging.

But it was really challenging and I underestimated the difficulty of playing a blind character because it was hard. Having the contact lenses you think, it looks interesting, but having to take them off every three hours and let it rest because it irritates your eyes and every ten minutes I needed drops. It bothers me. Very irritating. And you can’t really see. Somehow they couldn’t manage to, I know with technology today, they still were not able to manage to make blue pair of contact lenses and having that specific look and giving the full clarity for my sight. So I was having difficulty measuring the distance but most difficult wasn’t even about the seeing clearly. It was more as an actor I couldn’t look at my fellow actors in their eyes and I couldn’t get to all reactions. When I’m talking I have to look at a point. And that was very, very frustrating because I didn’t wanna look without the complexity of each line and the emotion.

So I was fine-tuning my acting every single day. So it was quite frustrating, it was kind of like you feel like you’re not in control of yourself, where you’re supposed to have all these years of experience being an actor. So that was quite difficult.”

Image courtesy of MomStart.com

Becoming Part of Star Wars History

“My agent called me and they said, “Disney wants you to be in Star Wars.” Then Gareth called and I was hoping for an answer and I got it, ’cause I didn’t really want to be that, I just want you to kick some Stormtrooper’s ass. He really felt I have the persona of portraying this character in his mind and that was the answer I was looking for as an actor. I know it sounds crazy, but in the very beginning I was hesitant of coming on board. I know “Star Wars,” but I didn’t wanted to leave my family, my kids and be in London for five months. I just got off from another movie and I live in Hong Kong.

I said, “I don’t know.” Then I went to my kids, Jasmine and James. They were 12 and 8. I said, “Do you want, do you like Baba home?” “Or do you want Baba to be in Star Wars?” Without a doubt they said, “Star Wars!”.

Then all the family members and friends and all the fan voices came out of nowhere and say, “Oh!” They found out about it and said, “You gotta be in Star Wars! You gotta be in Star Wars!” I realized I’m making history here, you know? So I’m so glad.”