Michelle Yeoh explains the strange worlds of Everything Everywhere All At Once

The epic, action-packed sci-fi adventure Everything everywhere at once transcends time and space and jumps through multiple universes. With so much happening – you could say so much happening everywhere at once – this is the best opportunity for a breakdown of what is going on. And who better to take us on a tour of the multiverse than the very center of it, longtime martial artist superstar Michelle Yeoh?

Yeoh plays Evelyn, an ordinary woman just trying to pass an IRS audit of the family laundromat. Her marriage to Waymond (Ke Huy Quan) is struggling, and her relationships with her daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu) and her father (James Hong) are both strained. During an IRS appointment, Evelyn is suddenly drawn into a universe-hopping escapade.

Through different realities and radically different possible lives, Yeoh guides Evelyn through her own emotional journey. Yeoh sat down with Polygon to delve into some of her favorites from these alternate timelines and lifetimes and give a glimpse of what it was like wriggling hot dog fingers into Jamie Lee Curtis’ face.

[Ed. note: Major spoilers ahead for Everything Everywhere All At Once.]

Evelyn’s movie star universe

One of the first alternate timelines in the film depicts the life Evelyn would have lived if she hadn’t taken off to America with Waymond when they were both young. After rejecting Waymond (and being mugged by one of the directors in a cameo), the alternate Evelyn trains in martial arts and becomes a successful action star, rising to international fame in the film industry. The parallels between Evelyn in this particular world and the real-life Michelle Yeoh are clear, but while writers and directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert intended it as a cheeky metatextual nod, Yeoh insisted they keep the character Evelyn separate from herself as an actress .

“When the Daniels started, they were always writing [her] Names like Michelle Wang,” Yeoh explains. “And I said no from the start. Her name isn’t Michelle because […] Evelyn deserves her own story to be told. This is a normal mother [and] Housewife doing her best to be a good mother to her daughter, a good daughter to her father, a woman trying to keep the family together […] I don’t like to integrate myself, Michelle Yeoh, into the characters I play because they each deserve their own journey and stories to tell.”

Evelyn’s journey not only explores the multiverse and the forces of nihilism, but also her fractured relationships and the constant struggle of what-ifs she feels within herself. Presenting a version of herself with fame, fortune, and prestige, Evelyn is initially drawn to the success she could have had if she simply said no to Waymond all those years ago.

“She became a big screen actress, she became very glamorous,” says Yeoh. “But then she lost the things she loved. She has no family. And worst of all, she has no daughter.”

The Hot Dog Finger Universe

“Honestly, the truth is, when I first read it, I said: Well I gotta find a way to tell these two guys this is coming out of the script‘ Yeoh laughs. In this universe, human evolution took a drastically different turn, for reasons also covered in a director’s cameo. Everyone in this world has long, rubbery hot dogs for their fingers. “[I had] no idea what they’re even talking about – mustard squirts out [of] Hot dog fingers in mouth, like No no.”

And those gummy hot dog appendages weren’t green screen graphics — they were very, very real. Yeoh says any use of CG in Everything everywhere was intended to enhance footage, not create new elements. The hot dog fingers were made for the actors.

“I had to put my hand in this tub of wax and I had hickeys on my knuckles,” she says. “Because they were sucked in and never came out. And I thought, No! I’m going to have to walk around with that tub on the end of my hand for the rest of my life!”

In the Hot Dog Finger universe, Evelyn is romantically involved with Deirdre (Jamie Lee Curtis), the IRS agent investigating her in Evelyn’s original universe. The film features glimpses of their intimate relationship, fairly normal and normal scenes of a couple falling in and out of love except for the hot dog fingers squirming around. In the hot dog universe, passion is expressed by people putting their fingers in their mouths in a kind of dance performance.

“Dance like that takes a fearless partner,” says Yeoh, referring to Curtis’ unflinching approach to the scene. “You must both look at each other and go, Here come these hot dog hands! We literally improvised this dance together.”

But even the best partner cannot dispel the initial fear of an erotic hot dog finger dance.

“Before you do it, you have so many strange thoughts,” Yeoh says. “How will it go? You know, it gets so embarrassing. I wasn’t embarrassed as – I’ve managed to hold it together over 30 years in the business. Am I going to just lose it now?”

As absurd as the hot dog dance is, the moment Evelyn and Deirdre perform it is bittersweet. It speaks to the strength of these two actors to be able to bring seriousness to a plot that was meant to be absolutely ridiculous.

“You can feel the love between them,” says Yeoh. “So that’s why it’s not just going to be silly. you want it to happen They want to see the development of this relationship. Because they are going through pain and separation. And then they get together, it’s like breakup sex.”

The Secret Universe of Harry Shum Jr

In this universe, Evelyn works as a hibachi cook alongside Chad (joyby Harry Shum Jr.). Evelyn’s boss tells her to pick up the pace as her cooking skills are slipping and Chad is stealing the show. But chef Evelyn enters Chad in the kitchen and finds that under his hat he’s being controlled by a singing, cooking raccoon, in a parody of Pixar’s Ratatouille.

“[Harry Shum Jr.] is so brilliant with his body language with that little raccoon,” says Yeoh. “He looked like a real raccoon. It scared the shit out of me the first time I saw it, and then when he does, Oh I’m controlled by this raccoon, ahhh!, We had so much fun. Because it was a real kind of robot [animatronic] on his head and it pulled and someone checked his mouth. It looks so damn real. It was scary.”

It’s also one of the film’s most hilarious and satisfying long cons, because earlier in the real world, Evelyn tries to explain the whole multiverse hopping conundrum to her family by equating it Ratatouille – only she mistakes the rat for a raccoon and calls it “Racca-coony”. Acting alongside an animatronic raccoon really tested Yeoh’s acting skills, but she dictates the scene where Evelyn explains the plot of Racca coony was a particularly satisfying challenge for her.

“I don’t do comedy! I don’t do stand up comedy. I’m not doing that!” She laughs. “There is no ego in this room. Anyone can be completely silly and crazy. That was the beauty of being free from thought Oh, that, that might look weird. It’s like, let it be weird and wonderful.”

The universe where no life exists

From all the chaotic universes that exist in Everything everywhere at onceYeoh is drawn to one in particular: the universe where life has never manifested, and Evelyn and her daughter take the form of simple rocks staring out at a canyon.

“I love the rock universe,” says Yeoh. “And I want to take credit for that. ‘Cause I told the Daniels Don’t make us do voiceovers for the rocks. It has to be quiet, doesn’t it? You hear the wind and all that. And they were so brilliant at putting that [makes a TCK-TCK-TCK noise] when the words came out I thought that was brilliant.”

Some of the film’s most important conversations take place between the rock versions of Evelyn and Joy, all through on-screen text while the wind howls around them. It’s the perfect pause in the film, highlighting the points with even more precision and depth.

“The movie is fast-paced and wild and chaotic,” says Yeoh. “It’s like pop art and pop music, and all of these things happen at the same time. But it’s also very much the world you [millennials] Everyone is used to it – with the internet, the flood of information. And then suddenly you jump from there into the rock universe, it’s like Okay, we can all breathe together now. This silence, I think, makes the chaos even more pronounced. The nice thing about coming out of the cinema and thinking Check us out, it’s so messy all the time. So we need to be able to step back and say: How do we heal ourselves? How shall we do it? You have to think about it and you have to do it together.”