TGIF FEATURE: Premiering Sunday, 'Into The Badlands' starring an Asian/American badass

Stephen Fung and Daniel Wu provides insight into their action-packed show' Into the Badlands.'

FINALLY, Into The Badlands, is here, premiering Sunday (Nov. 15) starring California-raised Daniel Wu, who may become the next big Asian/American action hero.

No yellow-face here. No eyes taped into a squint. No accents or speaking broken English. No mysterious sayings open to all kinds of misinterpretation. 

Anticipation for this AMC production has been building for a year and reached a crescendo with the previews at ComicCon in San Diego. Wu, who after years of starring in over 60 movies in Hong Kong, has come back home to see if a the tastes of the American television audience is ready for a heroic Asian badass.

Well ... OK, he's skilled in the martial arts. Some stereotypes are tough to kill. But he's a good guy. Or, at least he wants to be a good guy. A bad guy wanting to be a good guy. Something like that.

Be thankful for what he's not. Wu's Sunny is not: a sex-starved buffoon, a second banana (no pun intended), a nerd, a white guy's best friend or the anonymous Asian guy lurking in the background.

Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, Wu looked up to some of martial arts’ biggest stars. “As a Chinese-American kid growing up here, there was not many role models I could look up to on the big screen,” he said. “The ones that appeared were Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan and Jet Li. Those were the guys that inspired me to want to learn martial arts.”

Wu, along with fellow executive producer Stephen Fung, serves as fight director for the series.

Although best known for his action films - and Badlands does nothing to dispel that - it may be a recently released romantic comedy that will bring him the to the attention of Hollywood producers and writers. Go Away Mr. Tumour, is a gigantic box-office hit in China, and it is also China's entry in the foreign-language Oscar category.

"It's not at all my objective to become an Asian-American star," says Wu. He says it only occurred to him recently that he's now become that rare animal on American television: an Asian lead. "This will only be significant in proving that American tastes are evolving if (Into the Badlands) succeeds," he says.

The six-episode martial-arts series is set in a post-apocalyptic world where the last traces of civilization reside in territories controlled by power-mad feudal barons. Working for one of these is cold-blooded assassin Sunny (Wu), who embarks on a spiritual journey with a teenager, M.K. (Aramis Knight), in tow. (Although the role of M.K. was not intentionally written for an Asian actor, it turns out that Aramis is half-Pakistani.)

We will have to wait and see if Sunny gets the girl. Any white hero eventually ends up with the girl, right? Asian characters don't follow that path in U.S. productions. The danger of martial arts-based characters - especially those played by Asian actors - is that they are one-dimensional fighters and nothing else; essentially emotionally and physically neutered.

Let's hope that Wu, who is the show's executive producer, has enough moxie and pull with the AMC to allow Sunny evolve into a more complex, multifaceted character. That would help the push the show beyond the kung fu genre.

“It can’t be just a martial arts show,” says Wu. “That’s a very narrow niche. 

"Just like what ‘The Walking Dead’ did for the zombie genre, you have to elevate it to another level so an audience can get into it. It’s not zombies chomping on people. We’ve seen that since the ‘60s. It’s the same thing with us. We’re trying to create a really compelling story, around the martial arts.”

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