How 'The Brothers Sun' Choreographed Its Ambitious, Inventive, and Downright Weird Fight Scenes
SO MUCH OF the fun when watching Netflix's new action-comedy series The Brothers Sun comes from its breakneck viewing experience. Its many zany hand-to-hand combat scenes pack wall-to-wall stunts into every frame, and nested within those frenetic sequences are loving tributes to Asian cinema for those well-versed enough in their visual language to spot them. The fight choreography tends to be cribbed from the stylings of martial arts icons like Donnie Yen, Jackie Chan, Jet Li, and Tony Jaa. Even the show's fixation on food is an homage to Juzo Atami’s 1985 film, Tampopo, a comedy that birthed the "ramen Western," a reference to the European "spaghetti Western" genre. To bring its set-piece sequences to life, the show assembled a team of stunt vets steeped in martial arts knowledge—including brothers Brian Le and Andy Le (fight choreographers on Everything Everywhere All At Once), David Will No (a stunt performer in everything from The Gray Man to Dune to Barbie), 71-year-old James Lew (an Emmy-winning stunt coordinator), and Hiroo Minami (stunt double to famous martial artist and actor Hiroyuki Sonada), among many others.
It took a big team to choreograph the wacky, calculated chaos of the show's marathon fight sequences—like the battle royale set in a dim sum banquet hall or a melee against a gaggle of men in inflatable dinosaur costumes. The team was led by stunt coordinator Justin Yu and fight coordinators Eric Brown, Kyle Potter, and Michael Lehr.
But the show's leads, who play the titular Sun family, weren't newbs either—well, mostly. Michelle Yeoh, who plays the family matriarch, in addition to being the reigning Academy Award winner for Best Actress (for Everything Everywhere All At Once) is of course also martial arts legend. Justin Chien, who plays the estranged Sun brother turned Tapei gangster Charles, grew up watching the behind-the-scenes breakdowns of his favorite action movies, like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon ("I'm not saying that just because Michelle is in it," he adds). He trained in Muay Thai boxing in Taiwan at age 17 and recently got his blue belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Sam Song Li, for his part, dabbled in martial arts as a kid when his grandfather was "on a mission to turn me into the next Bruce Lee"—but it never quite took. "I had a very different stunt experience from the rest of the cast, he says as the Sun family's resident screw-up brother, "in the sense that I mostly had to run around like a chicken with its head cut off."
Fight coordinator Lehr also served as star Chien’s stunt double, which meant juggling his duties coordinating stunt sequences and and then training for those very sequences. "I'd wake up around 4:30 A.M., hit the gym and make sure to get in all my reps and training before heading to work at 7:00," he says. But he also gets his moment in the spotlight as a character who enters the fray in one particularly taxing scene: "I get absolutely beaten by a young man with a stick, just absorbing hits for something like 30 seconds straight," says Lehr. "Somewhere somebody has an hilarious cell phone video of me laying on the floor, eyes crushed shut, frowning and thinking, What a weird job I have.”
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