Daniel Wu received the Best from the East Award at the New York Asian Film Festival, capping a stretch that has put him back at the center of Hong Kong’s two biggest franchises: “Cold War 1994” and the “Twilight of the Warriors” series.
“Cold War 1994” is the third installment in the “Cold War” series, a prequel written and directed by Longman Leung and produced by Bill Kong and Ivy Ho, set in the run-up to Hong Kong’s 1997 handover. The first two films, released in 2012 and 2016, were the highest-grossing Hong Kong productions of their respective years. In the new film, Wu plays Peter Choi opposite Terrance Lau’s M.B. Lee, a character previously portrayed as a full-blown villain by Chang Kuo-chu in “Cold War 2.”
Wu tells Variety he never consciously stepped away from Hong Kong film. The pandemic simply thinned out a schedule that had settled into a rhythm of one American project and one Asian project a year. When “Cold War” came along, the pull was the production itself.
“It’s going to be a quality production, the scale of it, the script,” Wu says of what drew him back, pointing also to the chance to work alongside three generations of Hong Kong actors, including Lau, whom he singles out as representative of the industry’s new generation.
