The Big Picture

The actors of ‘Warrior’ found out the show would be returning for another season through a group Zoom call with the show creator, Jonathan Tropper. The cast was excited to delve deeper into their characters and explore new challenges and emotional arcs in Season 3. The season had a balance of intense emotional moments and lighter moments with humor, allowing the characters to showcase their complexity and range.

[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for Season 3 of Warrior.]In Season 3 of the Max series Warrior, based on the writings of martial arts legend Bruce Lee, Mai Ling (Dianne Doan) is attempting to consolidate power in her favor, but with change comes new enemies and allies are more important than ever. With Ah Sahm (Andrew Koji) juggling Tong politics with continuing to find his place in the Hop Wei and navigating the fact that Mai Ling is his sister, everything that’s simmering feels like it’s moving towards a boiling point with deadly consequences.

During this interview with Collider, co-stars Doan, Olivia Cheng (who plays Ah Toy, Chinatown’s most accomplished brothel madame and vigilante) and Hoon Lee (who plays Wang Chao, Chinatown’s most prolific fixer and profiteer) talked about how they found out that the series would actually be returning, getting to really dig deep with their characters, the trauma that comes from losing the promise of hope, the fight scene in episode eight, how Lee came to write an episode, and the possibilities for Season 4.

This interview was conducted prior to the SAG-AFTRA strike.

Collider: There was a minute where it seemed like this season wasn’t going to happen. How did you find out that it would? What was it like to actually get back into the headspace of these?

DIANNE DOAN: It was actually Jonathan Tropper that set up a group Zoom call, back in May of 2021. At the time, I was just like, “Oh, maybe it performed well on HBO Max and he wants to congratulate us or give us a little pat on the back, or something.” And it ended up being him, going one by one with each of us, asking the question, “In a world where it could be revived, would you even be interested?” It was a no-brainer unanimous decision because we all loved the show so much. And he told us that it wouldn’t happen for another year, and then once we shot it, another year to come out.

Image via Max

Hoon, when I spoke to you about Season 2, you said that you’d feel awful, if you didn’t get another shot at playing this character and that you’d be disappointed, if it didn’t go any further. After everything that Chao went through in Season 3 and how brutal it got for him, how are you feelings about returning to it now?

HOON LEE: That’s the best stuff, when you get an opportunity to explore deeply into a character and particularly put them in situations that test them. That’s where you learn more about them. That’s where the audience connects more deeply with them. So, I was very grateful to have the things that I was able to play in the season. And that goes for the stuff that Dianne and the stuff that Liv (Olivia Cheng) do in the season, which is truly remarkable movement for their character that allows them to showcase the depth of the things that they can do. As their friend and colleague, that’s incredibly exciting to see. The fans who have been with us since the beginning are going to be hungry in a disproportionate way because of the weight, and we tried to, as best we could, answer that appetite.

This season has a really interesting balance between things like the emotional intensity of the relationship between Young Jun and Father Jun, and then something with layers of humor like the sex scene with the German woman.

OLIVIA CHENG: What I love about the show is that it gives us that complexity and gives us that range to play because in life, we’re complex human beings,. We can be funny one moment, and we can be not feeling at our best in another. All these opposing truths can exist in the same space, in the same moment, and this show really gives us that range to play.

Olivia, how difficult is it for Ah Toy to see the possibility of hope and promise, and then have to return to the reality of life?

CHENG: I love what the writers gave Ah Toy to go through as a journey, this season. I remember a saying about hope being a dangerous beast, and that’s very much what Ah Toy goes through with her arc this season. She actually buys into this idea and this hope that she can have a peaceful, safe slice of the American dream. And then, we take that away, quite quickly, from her and the rest of her journey is actually just watching her come to terms with her own trauma and come to a place where she’s finally able to heal by allowing herself to feel everything that she’s been through.

Image via Max

Dianne, being a woman in power makes Mai Ling a threat to men and women. What’s it like for her to be in a position of power, but never feel like she really has any power? It’s really an everyday fight to not have someone kill her.

DOAN: In this season, you definitely see you’re more comfortable in that power. A lot of Season 2 was about what it took for her to get there, but then maintaining it. In Season 2, there was that constant fear of being taken out, or her power and her position being threatened. Throughout Season 3, she is being questioned by the elders, but I I feel like there’s this wonderful ease about her and her confidence within Chinatown, which is why she needs that shift and change. She’s a very ambitious woman, so she’s out looking elsewhere, in a different world.

There’s such an interesting moment with your character in episode eight, when you’re an observer to a fight between Joe Taslim and Mark Dacascos. What was it like to be a witness to something like that?

DOAN: Truth be told, I did not wanna be there. I was like, “Don’t you think she would run away, and not stand there?” It’s funny you ask that because I don’t think Mai Ling expected to put Li Yong in that position. She made the decision for the both of them, that Mark’s character would be no longer a threat, so it’s that acceptance of what she’s done. Has she pushed the envelope too far? She’s essentially watching her relationship with the one person that she loves, disintegrate in front of her, and it’s because of her. That was not an easy scene. And plus, physically, I don’t know how long they rehearsed for, but that scene took three days to shoot, and it was gruesome and rigorous, and a testament to them as athletes and artists.

LEE: And it was emotionally very taxing. It’s such an emotionally fraught fight for them. It was exhausting, on every level.

Image via Max

Hoon, how did you come to write an episode of the show? Was that something you’d been talking about doing? Did they come to you?

LEE: Developing story ideas and show ideas is something that I’ve been working on for a little bit now, in a tentative way. You’ve been around our cast and our show for a little while now, and I think it’s pretty clear that we have an exceptional bond and an atypical bond. What I realized was that, as the second season was concluding, I just felt very strongly compelled to integrate myself more into the show, as deeply as I could. This is a show that I feel so strongly about. This is a cast that I love, and colleagues and performers that I have tremendous respect and affection for. I thought, “This is a show that I would like to go into, as deeply as I possibly can.” So, I broached that subject with Jonathan, and having worked with him for eight out of the past 10 years, in some capacity, we know each other quite well, I know his style pretty well, and he’s always been very generous in the way he’s afforded me input into the characters and what happens to them. On both fronts, it wasn’t as unnatural as it might have felt, in other circumstances. It was just my job to not utterly mess it up and alienate all of my friends. So, it was a tremendous opportunity, not only to try a different aspect of the business, but most importantly, collaborate with my friends and colleagues in a different way, and hopefully give them something that they felt good about. I knew they were gonna do everything in their power to support me. That was a given in. It was really my end of the deal that had to be upheld, and I couldn’t be happier.

Was there something specific in that episode that you wanted to explore, whether it was a particular theme or a character dynamic?

LEE: The story is broken by the entire group in the writers’ room, so you don’t really know where you’re gonna fall in the season until quite late, until the entire season is broken. There were pragmatic things governing my assignment to that episode. The two avenues of thought where that I was either gonna be assigned an episode that had a lot of Chao in it because it’s a native voice for me and it might be easier to accomplish, or I was gonna be assigned an episode that had very little Chao in it, so that I wouldn’t have to do that dual duty, mentally. I was really excited to get this one, not only because of the events in it, but also because there are payoffs for so many things that get set up earlier in the season. While it’s a tremendous responsibility to do justice to those things, you get to set off the fireworks and see them explode, which was really, really fun. When Dianne was talking about filming that fight scene, she was 100% spot on that her character is rarely caught in a situation where she’s surprised and can’t manipulate it, even in the moment. I’m thinking about how, in Season 2, she casually drops the idea that Ah Sahm and her are siblings to Young Jun. She’s rarely caught flat-footed and this was an example where her plan didn’t work. It’s a complete surprise and there was really nothing for her to do about it. It was really in Li Yong’s hands, in a lot of ways, which is why there’s a bit of paralysis there, in the sense that she doesn’t actually know what’s gonna come after this.

Image via Max

How do you feel about where things were left for her, by the end of the season?

CHENG: Filming that last little bit for Ah Toy, I realized, as the actor, that it didn’t occur to me that she would just never get busted. So, I’m very curious to see, if we get a Season 4, what the consequences of Ah Toy’s vigilantism is going to bring and intersect that with where we end with Mai Ling and Ah Sahm, and Young Jun and Li Yong. It leaves so many of our characters in a different space, so to see how all those various courses might connect in another season, I’m very interested to see where that goes.

Warrior is available to stream at Max.