Bruce Lee's daughter saddened by portrayal of her father in 'Once Upon A Time in Hollywood'

Brad Pitt , left, challenges the Bruce Lee character played by Mike Moh in 'Once Upon A Time in Hollywood.

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Bruce Lee’s daughter, Shannon Lee, says it was “disheartening” to see her father depicted as “an arrogant asshole who was full of hot air” in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, reports The Wrap.

WARNING: SPOILERS BELOW.

In the movie, Cliff Booth, played by Brad Pitt, and Bruce Lee, played by Mike Moh, trade cocky insults. This leads to an informal, best two-out-of-three rounds fight on the set of The Green Hornet TV show: Lee swiftly knocks Booth down in the first round; Booth slams Lee into a car and stuns him in the second round; and the fight is interrupted before the third round.

“He comes across as an arrogant asshole who was full of hot air,” said Shannon Lee, who saw the film Sunday. “And not someone who had to fight triple as hard as any of those people did to accomplish what was naturally given to so many others.

“It was really uncomfortable to sit in the theater and listen to people laugh at my father,” she added. She said people often tried to challenge her father but he tried to avoid fights. “Here, he’s the one with all the puffery and he’s the one challenging Brad Pitt. Which is not how he was.”

Shannon Lee said Tarantino could possibly be trying to make a point about how her father was stereotyped, but it didn’t really come across that way to her. A representative for Tarantino didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

“I can understand all the reasoning behind what is portrayed in the movie,” she said. “I understand that the two characters are antiheroes and this is sort of like a rage fantasy of what would happen … and they’re portraying a period of time that clearly had a lot of racism and exclusion.

“I understand they want to make the Brad Pitt character this super bad-ass who could beat up Bruce Lee. But they didn’t need to treat him in the way that white Hollywood did when he was alive.”

While The Green Hornet ran from 1966-67, Shannon Lee pointed out that her father’s hair and sunglasses were more reminiscent of his look in 1973’s Enter the Dragon. She also noted that the film didn’t make fun of the character Steve McQueen, who is played by Damian Lewis.

Shannon Lee did explain that she thinks Moh did a good job portraying some of her father’s mannerisms and his voice. “But I think he was directed to be a caricature,” she added.

Shannon Lee continues her father’s legacy through BruceLee.com, her Bruce Lee Podcast, and the Bruce Lee Foundation, which hosts summer camps that teach children about Bruce Lee’s martial arts and philosophy. “What I’m interested in is raising the consciousness of who Bruce Lee was as a human being and how he lived his life,” she explained. “All of that was flushed down the toilet in this portrayal, and made my father into this arrogant punching bag.”

Matthew Polly writes in his book Bruce Lee: A Life that Lee struggled to break into Hollywood and was often overlooked or made a sidekick, such as in The Green Hornet, despite his role in teaching martial arts to some of Hollywood’s biggest names. These people included actors portrayed in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, such as McQueen, Sharon Tate, and her husband, Roman Polanski. The movie has a short clip of Lee training Tate, played by Margot Robbie, for her role in The Wrecking Crew, which Bruce Lee actually trained the real-life Tate for.

Unfortunately, Lee was even overlooked for roles as Asian characters in favor of white actors pretending to be Asian. He made his breakthrough when Hong Kong-produced martial arts epics became popularized in the US.

“The full scene with Bruce and Brad Pitt is far different than what was in the trailer,” Polly said of the Tarantino movie. “Bruce Lee was often a cocky, strutting, braggart, but Tarantino took those traits and exaggerated them to the point of a SNL caricature.”

Polly said the argument that begins the spar with Booth, which involves Lee saying he could turn Cassius Clay (Muhammad Ali) into a “cripple,” would never have happened.

“Bruce revered Cassius Clay (Ali); he never trash talked him in real life,” explained Polly. “Bruce never used jumping kicks in an actual fight. And even if he did, there wasn’t a stuntman in Hollywood fast enough to catch his leg and throw him into a car.

“Given how sympathetic Tarantino’s portrayal of Steve McQueen, Jay Sebring, and Sharon Tate is, I’m surprised he didn’t afford the same courtesy to Lee, the only non-white character in the film. He could have achieved the same effect -– using Bruce to make Brad Pitt’s character look tough – without the mockery. I suspect the reason Tarantino felt the need to take Bruce down a notch is because Lee’s introduction of Eastern martial arts to Hollywood fight choreography represented a threat to the livelihood of old Western stuntmen like Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), who were often incapable of adapting to a new era, and the film’s nostalgic, revisionist sympathies are entirely with the cowboys.”

According to his widow Linda Lee Cadwell, Bruce Lee had an idea for a western series, but Hollywood took his concept called "The Warrior" and turned it into the series Kung Fu starring David Carradine, reports Nerd Reactor. It was not until much later that Jonathan Tropper, Justin Lin, and Cinemax brought Bruce Lee’s concept to life. Warrior premiered in April 2019 and has been renewed for a second season; the series follows a martial arts prodigy who immigrates from China to San Francisco and is set during the Tong Wars in the late 1800s.