JuJu Chan Szeto isn’t your typical working mum. Aside from taking care of her infant daughter, Calysta, the 36-year old also juggles a career as a martial arts star, portraying on-screen characters as varied as ancient warriors and femme fatales in productions such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny (2016) and the Macao-shot Invincible Dragon (2019)
Much like her idol, Bruce Lee, Chan Szeto practises an eclectic range of martial arts including taekwondo, judo, wing chun, Muay Thai and wushu. It’s no surprise that the Hong Kong-born actress’ fans have dubbed her the “female Bruce Lee.”
[See more: Celebrating Bruce Lee’s Macao connections]
Speaking to Macao News at the Four Seasons Hotel in Macao, where she recently celebrated her birthday with her family, Chan Szeto says “I don’t want to be the female version of someone,” but acknowledges that Lee “inspires me” and that her association with the icon motivates her to do better, as “I need to push myself to live up to that.”
Juju Chan Szeto’s early beginnings in martial and performing arts
From an early age, Chan Szeto found herself drawn to the world of martial arts through her father, a computer expert who happened to be an action film fanatic.
“I would watch action films with him all the time, and then I would mimic whatever’s on the screen,” she recalls. “I remember one time we were watching an old Bruce Lee movie [where] he was swinging the nunchucks, so I tied rulers together with a string, and tried to copy the move.”
Mimicking Jackie Chan’s stunt of jumping between buildings with the family coffee table and couch finally persuaded her parents that their daughter’s obsession wasn’t going to go away. They sent her to receive proper training when she was ten.
“At that time, the closest martial arts school was a judo school, so I went to learn judo first,” the actress says.
The performing arts were another great love. Chan Szeto selected a computer science degree as an undergraduate at the University of San Francisco, but ended up completing a master’s degree in film and TV at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts.
Upon graduating, she sought to break into the entertainment industry by modelling and participating in beauty pageants, and in 2010 landed an appearance on the RTHK reality program, Rich Mate Poor Mate, which saw her holed up in a cage home in Sham Shui Po for five days, in an attempt to draw attention to poverty in Hong Kong.
During those early years, Chan Szeto also found time to write two books (one semi-autobiographical, the other an etiquette guide), make an album (called I Wanna Hold Your Heart, it won two music awards) and bag medals for Hong Kong at the 18th World Taekwon-Do ITF Championships and 8th China Open Taekwon-Do Championship.
However, it was only upon meeting and collaborating with her future husband Hong Kong-Australian martial arts director and choreographer Antony Szeto that the young actress realised she could merge her love for martial arts and acting into a single career.
Collaborations between JuJu Chan Szeto, Michelle Yeoh and other stars
The two married in 2019. While they have yet to collaborate on a new project since tying the knot, they continue to act as each other’s anchors.
“If we’re not working with each other, we’re always supporting each other,” says the action star. “He’s still giving me input in my projects, and I will also [be] helping him with some of his stuff.”
Chan Szeto has meanwhile collaborated with actors like Nicholas Cage, as well as cinematic legends such as Michelle Yeoh, Donnie Yen and Yuen Woo-ping. She worked with the latter three in the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon sequel, a film in which she played the role of Silver Dart Shi, an itinerant warrior.
On collaborating with Yeoh, Chan Szeto describes the Oscar-winning actress as a down-to-earth person who was “always full of smiles,” “friendly” and willing to “talk to everyone,” even going so far as joining the crew for karaoke during the shoot in New Zealand.
“There were actors that are not that famous, but they have huge egos and attitude, but she [Yeoh] is great, and that’s why everyone’s so happy when she won the Oscar and other film awards,” Chan Szeto observes.
Working with Donnie Yen also proved to be an enriching experience for the young performer who says that the martial artist – best known for his role as Bruce Lee’s master in the Ip Man series – is the epitome of professionalism.
“He has standards for his action choreography, which is great,” the actress says. “Jackie Chan, Bruce Lee [and] Jet Li…all uphold their action standards. They won’t let other people take charge of their action sequences.”
Neither will Chan Szeto. While shooting Wu Assassins (2019), the Netflix series in which she played a deadly triad bodyguard, she volunteered to be involved throughout the choreography process and not employ a stunt double. “Even the choreographer, Dan Rizzuto said I was the first actress who actually did previs [previsualization] myself,” she recalls.
Another martial arts legend that Chan Szeto looks up to is Gordon Liu, who starred in The 36 Chambers of Shaolin (1978), a male-dominated film that she admits she would love to remake, albeit with a female cast.
In the decades following the release of that seminal classic, Liu continued to pursue a successful career, gaining international recognition as a yakuza leader and kung fu master in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Volume 1 (2003) and Volume 2 (2004). However, at the age of 56 in 2011, the famed martial artist was suddenly hit with a stroke that rendered his right-side paralysed, forcing him into a nursing home, where he remains to this day.
Liu’s story reflects the wider issue of kung fu veterans having to grapple with the spectre of ageing and physical decline. When asked whether or not there comes a point at which older kung fu stars should throw in the towel and redirect their career towards more dramatic roles, Chan Szeto says it is ultimately “a personal choice.”
She mentions a myriad of factors that inform an action star’s decision, including audience expectations, the industry’s need to “keep pushing the limits” and a genuine love for performing. The kung fu actress also acknowledges that typecasting can be an issue, noting that “I love doing dramatic films, but I haven’t received a role.”
The decline of Hong Kong action cinema
While Hong Kong still manages to occasionally produce gems such as last year’s Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In (2024), the golden age of Shaw Brothers and Golden Harvest productions, featuring bonafide stars such as Bruce Lee, Angela Mao, Cheng Pei-pei, Sammo Hung and Jimmy Wang Yu are well and truly over.
Chan Szeto points out that part of the problem is the lack of funding for films in Hong Kong, which is made even more difficult for action movies, as they “tend to need a bigger budget.” She notes that “A lot of the films that are very successful right now are comedy [and] drama.”
The timing is good, in other words, for Chan Szeto to take a hiatus from her career as a kung fu star. She does have a part in Fight or Flight (2025), starring Josh Hartnett, scheduled for release in the US at the end of February. But mostly, she is redirecting her attention to looking after her baby daughter Calysta. She is also starting a second masters later this year, this time in AI.
“AI eventually is going to be everything, even in entertainment, in health, in everything,” she explains, adding that “I’m just interested in studying and I want to be a role model for my daughter [by imparting the message] that we should continue learning and education is important.”
The busy mother is also hoping to work with her husband on a new project, noting that he “wrote a script for me and my daughter” that they hope to get off the ground this year.
While it’s still early days for baby Calysta, the couple have already begun introducing martial arts to their daughter. A cursory glance at their social media posts from the past year shows Calysta wearing a toddler’s version of Bruce Lee’s iconic yellow jumpsuit while wielding a nunchuck, and her two parents keeping her entertained by doing forward rolls.
“She will definitely know martial arts because we are both martial artists and martial arts will be part of our routine every day,” Chan Szeto says. “It’s in her blood already.”
The action star, however, doesn’t intend to push her daughter to enter show business, reasoning that “it’s up to her” to decide which path she’ll chart in life. This, of course, is in keeping with Chan Szeto’s favourite Bruce Lee quote: “Always be yourself, express yourself, have faith in yourself. Do not go out and look for a successful personality and duplicate it.”
