In just a few short years, Angela Yuen has firmly positioned herself as one of Hong Kong’s fastest rising young actresses with a string of commercial and critically acclaimed hits.
Box office smash Chilli Laugh Story, acclaimed drama The Narrow Road, Golden Horse award-winner Fly Me To The Moon and Louis Koo drama Vital Signs are among her growing roster of credits.
At the New York Asian Film Festival (NYAFF), Yuen will present two of her latest features: Gamer Girls, about an all-female esports team; and Afterpiece, a showbiz satire set against the backdrop of the theatre world.
She will also be honoured with the Screen International Rising Star Asia Award.
“It’s a big encouragement to receive such an award,” Yuen tells Screen, ahead of receiving the honour on July 21. “I actually fear big awards because I want to keep taking risks with new projects and don’t want prizes to make me settle into my comfort zone. But I imagine myself in this career for a very long time so, knowing that, I don’t need much recognition – but I’m very happy when it comes, of course.”
A career on screen was never the plan. Raised in a blue-collar family, she studied accounting at Hong Kong Baptist University. But work as a model also saw her land a 2015 Maxim’s commercial and interest from young film directors followed.
“I was invited by a lot of film students to star in their final year projects,” she recalls. “They couldn’t hire professional actors so that became the main source of opportunities for me in short films. That’s when I realised I loved acting and remembered how, growing up, I would always imitate other people and mimic their faces.”
Her first major role came when Christopher Doyle cast her in The White Girl, playing a character allergic to the sun opposite Joe Odagiri, which premiered at the BFI London Film Festival in 2017 before going on a festival run.
She drew wider notice in Wing-cheong Law’s Little Q in 2019. Then, as cinemas began to get back on their feet after the pandemic, Yuen scored a hat-trick with Chilli Laugh Story, Hong Kong Family, and The Narrow Road – all released in 2022.
“I made all those films in 2021 and surprised myself,” she recalls. “The year before, I’d had lots of auditions but couldn’t grasp it. I was either not confident enough or unsuitable for the roles. But in 2021, I was full of energy that was ready to burst out and coincidentally, luckily or magically, I got these opportunities.”
Coba Cheng’s Chilli Laugh Story was one of the first titles released after cinemas reopened in Hong Kong post-lockdown and ranked as the fifth highest-grossing local film of the year.
Lam Sum’s The Narrow Road saw Yuen play a free-spirited single mother taking cleaning work through locked-down Hong Kong opposite Louis Cheung. The performance earned her best leading actress nominations at the Golden Horse Awards and Hong Kong Film Awards.
“The Narrow Road was definitely a big role for me because it’s a big protagonist movie and features has a very good depiction of women,” says Yuen. “After the Golden Horse Awards [held in Taipei], I was given a lot of projects outside of Hong Kong, which was not very common at that time.”
These include Hong Kong-Taiwan fantasy romance Measure In Love, which premiered at Busan, and upcoming Taiwanese series Fired Up! for HBO Max.
“Now I’m thinking about making films outside of Asia,” says Yuen, who cites the work of Lars von Trier, Celine Sciamma, Jafar Panahi, Asgar Farhadi and Ken Loach as directors she admires.
Looking ahead, she will again play a single mother in an as-yet-unnamed project, which “has a very different texture to The Narrow Road”.
In the meantime, she is looking forward to her first visit to NYAFF and has her sights set on the US.
“There is a mesmerising energy about America because I grew up watching a lot of commercial American films in Hong Kong,” adds Yuen. “Now I know my own taste better, I might lean more towards arthouse films or drama, but I do have this American dream – if it will take me in.”
The 25th NYAFF runs until July 26.
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