Michelle Yeoh Starring In Highly Anticipated Netflix Fantasy Series
Michelle Yeoh is keeping her hot streak alive by starring in an upcoming Netflix adaptation of a mega-popular fantasy series.
It’s Geeked Week over at Netflix, when the popular streaming service announces and teases its upcoming genre series and films. That means lots of new trailers have dropped, including one for an upcoming adaptation that has fans worldwide: a film based on the popular book series The School for Good and Evil. Not only does it have a strong creative team, including Paul Feig (Bridesmaids), it has an all-star cast, including Michelle Yeoh, who has been on a winning streak lately with her appearances in Everything Everywhere All at Once, Star Trek: Discovery, and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. The trailer was posted to the official Netflix Geeked Twitter account, which covers their genre films and shows exclusively.
The film is based on the New York Times bestselling Young Adult novel of the same name, the first of six in a series written by Soman Chainani, who states “To have one of your favorite directors adapt your book into a film for Netflix is an honor and a dream. Paul Feig is a brilliant filmmaker and a master of tone — a perfect fit for the twists and turns of The School for Good and Evil. I have no doubt that he will make a true fairy tale classic.” To complete Feig’s vision, Netflix has brought together some A-list actors, including Oscar winner Charlize Theron (who can be heard narrating the trailer), Oscar winner Ben Kingsley (who co-starred with Michelle Yeoh in Shang-Chi), Emmy winner Kerry Washington (Scandal), Oscar nominee Laurence Fishburne (The Matrix series), and Yeoh, who earned a BAFTA nomination for Best Actress in 2001 for Wo hu cang long. A release date has not been announced, although the trailer states a fall premiere.
The film follows best friends Sophie (Sophia Anne Caruso) and Agatha (Sofia Wylie), who are taken to the School for Good and Evil, where regular boys and girls are trained to become fairy tale heroes and villains. Students are assigned to either The School for Good, where fairy tale legends like Snow White and Cinderella attended or The School of Evil, which turns out the greatest baddies of all time. Things are turned upside-down, then, when Sophie (who has always wanted to be a princess) is assigned to the School of Evil, and Agatha (who has an attitude as grim as her black cat) is placed in the School of Good, a total mismatch of their personalities. It begins an adventure where each discovers who they truly are. Charlize Theron plays Lady Lesso, Michelle Yeoh (who is not shown in the trailer) plays Professor Anemone, Laurence Fishburne plays the School Master, and Kerry Washington plays Professor Dovey.
Michelle Yeoh became an international star in 1997, when she appeared opposite James Bond himself, Pierce Brosnan, in Tomorrow Never Dies. However, the Malaysian native had been an action star long before that, appearing in numerous Hong Kong action classics, including The Heroic Trio, Royal Warriors, and the Supercop movies with Jackie Chan. Yeoh is a trained dancer and former beauty queen and can handle action scenes so well, she is one of the few actresses that Chan allows to do their own dangerous stunts in his films. Her other film credits include Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, and Crazy Rich Asians. She will next be seen in the upcoming Avatar sequels and the Netflix spinoff series The Witcher: Blood Origin.
