He’s been called Hong Kong’s King of Cool, and indeed there’s no one cooler than Chow Yun-Fat. From blasting onto the screen as the pistol packing gangster Mark Gor in John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow, to other Woo classics such as The Killer, and Hard Boiled, for a time Chow Yun-Fat was the greatest Hong Kong icon since perhaps Bruce Lee.
His career in the eighties and nineties was storied, with leading roles in “heroic bloodshed” action pics like Full Contact, God of Gamblers and Ringo Lam’s “ON FIRE” trilogy, City of Fire, Prison on Fire and Prison on Fire 2. He then had a major breakthrough into North America with The Replacement Killers, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and more. But in recent years, Chow Yun-Fat has been on the down-low.
Despite starring in some of the most financially successful Chinese movies of the last decade or so, even since Project Gutenberg, he’s been inactive. What happened? We try to get to the bottom of it in WTF Happened to Chow Yun-Fat!