Actress unleashes killer instinct in Havoc

Known for serious drama, Yeo Yann Yann plays a triad boss in the Tom Hardy action thriller

- John Lui

Yeo Yann Yann is entering her violent villain era – she makes an entrance in her new movie by whipping out a pistol and killing two men in quick succession.

This is not the serious dramatic actress that local audiences are familiar with.

The Singapore-based Malaysian has worked with award-winning Singaporean director Anthony Chen twice: first by playing an anxious pregnant mother in his Cannes Film Festival-winning drama Ilo Ilo (2013), then as an unhappy wife in his second feature Wet Season (2019), for which she picked up Best Leading Actress at the Golden Horse Awards.

She then made her Hollywood debut in the Disney+ fantasy-comedy series American Born Chinese (2023), as the mum of the teen protagonist (Ben Wang).

But in the action thriller Havoc, her biggest international movie to date, Yeo is Mother, a triad boss seeking vengeance for the killing of her son.

When viewers first see her, she personally executes two men she suspects of betrayal.

“Making Havoc was very fun because I got to play with guns,” the 48-year-old tells The Straits Times in a Zoom interview about the US-UK production starring English actor Tom Hardy and premiering on Netflix on April 25.

“I had a chance to do weapons training, which I’ve never done before. On set, they treat guns very, very seriously. It was amazing to understand how I should handle the weapon correctly.”

The guns she fired were real, but loaded with blanks.

Mother, as one of several villains in Havoc, does not get a full backstory. So Yeo, after speaking with Welsh writer-director Gareth Evans, decided on the character’s history: She was an assassin who rose through the triad ranks by being the most skilled and cold-blooded killer — and she speaks English and Cantonese.

So Yeo had to look professional around firearms. “It was important for Mother to look like she knows her stuff,” she says.