Why Jackie Chan felt pressure from Michelle Yeoh’s action skills in Police Story 3: Supercop to take on more dangerous stunts

Police Story 3 features two of Chan and Yeoh’s greatest stunts – one that nearly ended badly for her and one he said was ridiculous and ‘really scared’ him

Yeoh’s stunt work was so good in the film, Chan has admitted he had to think of even more dangerous stunts for himself to not be outshone

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Jackie Chan and Michelle Yeoh in a still from Police Story 3: Supercop. Chan admitted Yeoh’s stunt work was so good he felt pressure to put himself in danger so he would not be outshone.

Published: 2:30am, 21 Nov 2021

Police Story and its sequel featured some of Jackie Chan’s most notable stunts, and both films had been big hits. At the turn of the 1990s, producers Golden Harvest wanted to make a third instalment to refit Chan’s image for the new decade, and decided they needed to add some new elements to keep the series fresh.

Chan had always directed his own films for the studio, but his Operation Condor had taken two years to complete – too long for a studio which mainly ran on their top star’s box-office proceeds. So Golden Harvest gave the job of directing Police Story 3: Supercop (1992) to Stanley Tong Kwai-lai, a former stuntman, assistant director and production executive – and also a good friend of Chan’s – who said he could deliver something new in a year.

“I went through all of Chan’s old films to see what worked and what didn’t,” Tong told Ariane Simard. “The studio asked me what I could do to make it different.”

Tong’s big idea was to hire the popular Michelle Yeoh, who had been in retirement for four years following her marriage to D&B Films mogul Dickson Poon, to play a police officer alongside Chan. The resulting movie brought China into the storyline and added more machinery and vehicles to the stunts.

The story is just an excuse for the plentiful action. Chan plays a Hong Kong police officer who is sent to China to arrest a drug smuggling gang, and Yeoh plays his counterpart there. The pair free one of the drug smugglers from a prison camp to win his trust, and then infiltrate the gang.