“I’m just going to stand here and take this all in,” Michelle Yeoh said when she took the stage at Tuesday’s Golden Globes to accept her award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture Musical or Comedy. And over the next several minutes, the Everything Everywhere All at Once star relished every moment of that triumph.
“Forty years, not letting go of this,” she added, thanking the Hollywood Foreign Press Association for giving her the award. “It’s been an amazing journey and incredible fight to be here today. But I think it’s been worth it.” The rapt crowd of her peers broke into a laugh when Yeoh quipped, “I remember when I first came to Hollywood, it was a dream come true—until I got here.”
“Look at this face!” the Malaysian-born actress said of herself. “I came here and was told, ‘You’re a minority,’ and I’m like, ‘No, that’s not possible.’” Yeoh recalled that when someone marveled that she could speak English, she replied, “Yeah, the flight here was about 13 hours long, so I learned.”
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As the music started to play her off, Yeoh turned to the side of the stage and invoked her martial arts mastery as she playfully threatened, “Shut up, please. I can beat you up, and that’s serious!”
Yeoh continued by speaking graciously about her role as Evelyn in The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once.
“I was given this gift of playing this woman who resonated so deeply with me and so many people,” she said. “Because at the end of the day, in whatever universe she was at, she was just fighting—fighting for love for her family.”
Then, after shouting out her co-stars—including “my hot dog lover, Jamie Lee Curtis”—Yeoh said, “This is 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. So thank you for believing in us, thank you so much.”
