Into the Badlands star Daniel Wu chats with Hypable about what we can expect from season 2, as well as his role in the upcoming Tomb Raider reboot.
Wu plays Sunny on Into the Badlands, a fantastic genre-bending show that mixes a compelling story of survival with incredible fight choreography. Season 1 is currently available on Netflix in the U.S., and season 2 airs on AMC each Sunday at 10 p.m. ET. You can check out our preview of what’s come in season 2, with links to individual interviews with several other major cast members.
Interview with Daniel Wu, star of ‘Into the Badlands’
How do you balance being an executive producer on the show and being the show’s star?
It’s crazy. It’s a very busy schedule. I work six-day weeks. I think I’m one of the only actors that actually works six-day weeks because of the fighting, my schedule, and all that kind of stuff. When I’m on set, when [I have] downtime, I’m never in my trailer. I don’t think I actually ever go in my trailer except to change in the morning and change when I leave. So during all that downtime, I’m working on other aspects of the show, prepping stuff we need to do for the next day or the next coming days, all that kind of stuff. It’s very, very, very busy.
Not that I was counting or anything, but there were 15 months between the end of season 1 and the beginning of season 2. How did you prepare to come back into the role of Sunny and was it easy to slip back into that character?
I kept training during the off-season, which is good for me. Before season 1, it had been probably five or six years before I’d done any martial arts action stuff in film, so I was not in movie fighting shape. I still trained three, four days a week, but an hour or two a day is different than when you’re prepping to do 10 hour days for five months. So in the 15 month off-season, I just made sure I stayed in shape, stayed flexible, and just kept training.
And what about the character aspect of it?
It was nice to actually get in the writer’s room early. I don’t actually take much part in the writer’s room, but it was cool to get my perspective in there in terms of what I wanted for sunny for the next season, for this coming season. They already have a plan for him, but for me, it was just to make sure to keep him on a journey because that was always the ethos of the show. This season the focus is much more clear. Sunny has to get back into the Badlands and find his family. I wanted to have it be a more emotional journey for him this season. I think last season he was in a state of confusion, he wasn’t really sure what he was going to do, he just knew he didn’t want to be there anymore. But he wasn’t sure how he was going to get out, and meeting M.K. kind of threw that all into a bit of more confusion for him because he wasn’t sure if this kid was telling the truth, and if he was, then it’s possible that we may be from the same place, Azra. That first season, Sunny was processing, and this season he’s more focused on an actual mission and on an actual goal.
Do you have any hand in what the series looks like, particularly the costumes, because it’s such a vibrant show and I can imagine how fun it would be putting together all those different elements that shouldn’t work but kind of do anyway.
Not too much. My executive producing duties are really related to martial arts stuff, story-wise as well as action, but I put in my two cents here and there on certain things, like the weapons designs. The costumes, no; I leave that up to our wonderful, amazing costume designer Giovanni [Lipari]. He did an amazing job of sort of looking at what we did last season and kind of taking it to the next level for this season. And our showrunner Miles Millar is kind of our aesthetics guy, our taste guy, so he’s the one who really gives the green light or red light for whatever.
I know in season 1, a lot of the filming took place in Louisiana. How did that location affect the way you approached the season?
The weather was hard to deal with in New Orleans. It was so hot. It’s very similar to Hong Kong in the summer, which is terrible. It’s like 100 degrees and 90% humidity, and I’m wearing a leather trench coat. It was not comfortable at all. Ireland, by far, was way, way more comfortable. Although it got chilly near the end, I prefer that to the unwavering heat in New Orleans. It was bad.
You guys always find really inventive ways to make the fight sequences interesting and intense, like in the season 2 premiere when Sunny has to fight all those opponents locked in the pillory. That was crazy! Do you have to worry about always one-upping the choreography that came before?
I wouldn’t say we try to one-up, but we try to make each one slightly different, so there’s something different to appreciate about each fight. When you’re doing a show like this and there’s going to be dozens and dozens of fights over the whole entire run of this show, you’ve got to make a good variety of different fights and make them interesting and different. Otherwise, if they’re similar in style, the audience will get bored, and we will get bored making it. So, for us, it’s about trying to find something different about each one and using that to our advantage, making it more interesting because of it.
So, like in this season, in the first fight that I’m in, in the boarder mine wearing that wooden stock, in the script it originally said that it actually gets taken off before the fight starts, but Master DeeDee, our choreography, thought it might be more interesting if we keep this thing on. And we agreed to that. The props department was freaking out because they’re like, “Really? You want to wear that thing while you’re fighting?” But it made for a much more interesting fight, and it almost became a Jackie Chan-esque type of fight because we were using props as a way to facilitate the fight. And then when we went to the second fight that happens in the mine with me and Bajie chained together, that’s really a straight up Jackie Chan type of fight, where it’s this odd couple stuck together, one knows how to fight and one kind of doesn’t know how to fight, and how do we use that leverage to my advantage? That point of adversity becomes something that you end up using as a tool to win the fight.
With things like that, we try to change it up and make it very different. And in the last season, we went through a whole bunch of different kinds of fights: there was the rain fight, there was the warehouse fight with one guy versus 40 guys, there was the Sunny versus Widow fight where we rifle through a bunch of weapons — and that’s harkening back to the Shaw brothers and more traditional Kung fu. A real Kung fu master, who is a master of all the weapons, is a master of 18 different traditional weapons. We don’t go through 18 weapons in that scene, but we tried to go through a whole bunch so it kind of reflected that idea. The rain fight was an homage to The Grandmaster’s opening scene fight, and then the abbot fight was an homage to old school Shaw brothers fights, where you have the enemy fighting in a weird kind of formation or pattern, and then the hero has to figure out how to undo that. In this case, Sunny couldn’t do that and he lost. So we approach each one with a different lens each time.
How has getting 10 episodes for season 2 affected the story you guys are trying to tell?
It’s a full season. Last season was more like an extended pilot, so we were able to introduce some things and kind of give you a glimpse of the world, but not really show you the whole thing. But now, this season, we really expanded on the show in terms of the world building and letting you see what the world outside of the Badlands is like. We talked about it last season, but you didn’t get to see it, and all those outlying areas. You get to see the wall. Later, on the next episode, during the conclave, you get to see all the other Barons. The 10 episodes allows us to open up the show and tell a much longer story. And also, if you notice this season, the characters are all split apart, so with a 10 episode season, that helps tell the stories in a more focused way, and we can actually take our time with that and not feel rushed.
I wanted to asked about the conclave, too, because considering the tension between all these leaders, and the Widow’s habit of finding a way for her enemies to fight amongst themselves before she ever even has to throw a punch, what can you tease us about what’s going to be coming up with that?
I don’t have too many spoilers, but as usual in the Badlands, all hell is going to break loose. So you can expect that. This season, you really get to see the Widow try to function as an actual leader. I think last season she was more like a rebel character, and now she’s actually in a position of power, and she’s trying to hold that position. What’s cool is how she deals with the other Barons and how they view her. What she may think is a very righteous way of thinking about how life can be in the Badlands, the other Barons may not necessarily agree with that and you’ll see why.
Nick Frost has been an incredible addition to the cast, and he really helps balance out Sunny’s very serious demeanor, so what’s it been like working with him and what can we expect to see between those two going forward?
I love it. I feel like last season was really difficult for me because I had no one to talk to as Sunny. He couldn’t reveal his plans to Veil because that would put her in danger. He couldn’t really reveal his plans to M.K. because he didn’t really trust the kid. He wasn’t sure where this kid was coming from, so he had no one to really vocalize any of his concerns with. But now with Bajie, obviously in the beginning they don’t talk much, and they’re trying to feel each other out, but as you see as episodes roll along, they start to gain each other’s trust. The last episode with Bajie kind of saving Sunny from Moon, that solidified a bit of trust there, and so therefore their relationship is going to evolve, and it will evolve over the season. It’s been great. I love it. I love the levity that Nick Frost brings to the show because I think we’ve needed that, but the other characters really couldn’t provide that because we were all on a very serious mission. The great thing is it kind of relates to how this show is very loosely based on Journey to the West, the character in Journey to the West is very similar [to Bajie]. He’s a gruff dude who is also very funny at times, and so it kind of relates back to that original character. It’s great. I love it. I love working with him. He’s probably one of my most favorite actors to work with. We have a very similar sense of humor, so it’s great.
Speaking of season 1, what did make you guys decide to keep Quinn alive rather than ending his story when Sunny ran him through?
I think there was a little more story that needed to be told with him! Of course, ultimately, that wasn’t my decision, but we weren’t quite done with him yet. In the way that Sunny “killed” him, Sunny is a more thorough person than that, and when running him through with the sword obviously didn’t kill him, it shows that Sunny maybe wasn’t ready to do that yet. I think what Sunny was struggling with last season was the fact that this man who raised him his whole life, who was like a father figure to him, now he’s turning against this person, and this person he sees as getting crazy, but it doesn’t negate the fact that there’s positive emotions toward Quinn. Killing him wasn’t necessarily as black and white as others may think it seems.
I found it, especially near the end, incredible that Sunny was able to fight for so long against the three monks from Azra. So what does this say about how special he is and his own power and ability?
Quinn talks about him in season 1, that he had a special gift, that he was able to do things that other people weren’t. So that may be a clue into Sunny’s past, and why his skills are so superior to everyone else’s. But we don’t get into that this season, really, but I think it leaves a trail for questions.
And now that Sunny’s no longer a clipper, can we expect any interesting partnerships between him and maybe some of the other characters that we’ve already met?
That’s a good question because can you ever really give up being a clipper? Because you have those tattoos on your back, that’s forever, so I think that’s the question this season: can he really not be a clipper because he’s not a clipper anymore, but is that truly the fact? And you’ll see, as the episodes roll along, the interactions he has with other people, how he deals with getting sucked back into the Badlands.
Is there anything you can tell us about your involvement in ‘Tomb Raider’ and what drew you to the role?
What drew me to the role was two things, really. One is Alicia [Vikander]. I fell in love with her character in Ex Machina. I was like, this actress is amazing, I would love to work with her one day. And then I got this offer about two weeks before I was finishing season 2 of Badlands, and I was like, I’m in. The second was the location, South Africa, which is a country I love. I was married there, I have a property there. I used to go there once a year for the past dozen years, so I love that place, and to be able to work there is a great opportunity. So being able to work with Alicia and also working in a place I love is two great things that you can’t go wrong with.
It’s a reboot, it’s based off the 2013 reboot of the game, and obviously there’s changes here and there, but it’s the origin story of Lara, and so it goes back to her before she becomes the tomb raider that you knew in the original game. It’s a young Lara Croft, she’s figuring herself out, trying to find her way, and I play a character, Lu Ren, who’s a ship captain who helps her along the way on this journey. She enlists me to help her find her father on this crazy journey, and I go with her. That’s pretty much all I can say right now. Alicia is amazing. She’s like a powerhouse. She’s really taken this thing by the horns. Considering she’s someone who’s never done action before, she just dove right into it, head first. I was pretty impressed. No fear.
