Michelle Yeoh won a Golden Globe for best actress and jokingly threatened to 'beat up' the piano player who tried to cut off her speech
- Michelle Yeoh won the Golden Globe for best actress in a motion picture, musical, or comedy.
- The award was for her riveting work in "Everything Everywhere All at Once."
After 40 years of working in movies, Michelle Yeoh is finally having her moment — and she wasn't going to let the Golden Globes piano player cut her short.
The versatile actor, who won the Golden Globe for best actress in a motion picture, musical, or comedy, gave a moving speech at the ceremony on Tuesday.
Yeoh recalled first landing in Hollywood.
"It was a dream come true until I got here," Yeoh said. "Because look at this face. I came here and was told, 'you're a minority, and I'm like, 'No, that's not possible.' And then someone said to me, 'You speak English. I mean, forget about them not knowing Korea, Japan, Malaysia, Asia, India. And I said, yeah, the flight here was about 13 hours long. So I learned as time went by."
Yeoh, who said she was 60 years old, acknowledged the harsh realities many female actors face as they get older.
"It seems like opportunities start to get smaller as well," she said. "And I probably was at a time where I thought 'well, hey, come on, girl. You had a really, really good run. You worked with some of the best people Steven Spielberg, you know, Jim Cameron, and Danny Boyle. And so it's good. It's all good."
But "Everything Everywhere All at Once," which Insider selected as the best movie of 2022, is widely considered by critics as Yeoh's best work yet. Playing Evelyn, a miserable laundromat owner who gets roped into saving the multiverse, Yeoh displayed her widest range in a role yet.
As the piano player started up to usher Yeoh off stage she jokingly said: "Shut up. Please. I can beat you up. And that's serious."
"I was given this gift of playing this woman who resonated so deeply with me and with so many people, because at the end of the day in whatever universe she was, she was just fighting, fighting for love for her family," Yeoh continued.
Yeoh concluded by thanking her cast members, including Stephanie Hsu and Jamie Lee Curtis, adding the award was "also for all the shoulders that I stand, on all who came before me who look like me, and all who are going on this journey with me forward. Thank you for believing in us."