Yeo Yann Yann breaks bad in Netflix action thriller Havoc (2025)

SINGAPORE – 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.

Yeo Yann Yann breaks bad in Netflix action thriller Havoc (1)

In Havoc, Walker (Hardy) is a cynical, morally compromised detective at war with the criminal underworld.

Following a botched drug deal, he is pursued by the gang led by Mother and her loyal subordinate Ching (Sunny Pang). He is also being hounded by the corrupt politician Lawrence Beaumont (Forest Whitaker) and his former partner Vincent (Timothy Olyphant). His only ally appears to be Ellie (Jessie Mei Li), a young and naive policewoman.

Film-maker Evans rose to fame with his made-in-Indonesia martial arts movies Merantau (2009), The Raid (2011) and its 2014 sequel, each featuring the native fighting style of pencak silat, as depicted by stars Iko Uwais, Joe Taslim and Yayan Ruhian.

Yeo, at just 1.56m tall, is a diminutive presence in scenes where she is often the only woman, surrounded by taller men.

“I looked around the set and I thought, ‘Oh my god, I’m the shortest here.’ So I decided – I might be the shortest, but I have to be the most powerful woman in the story,” she says.

“The biggest sign that Mother has power is that she doesn’t have to say anything. All I needed to do was move my finger, or move my eyes. That was all.”

Yeo Yann Yann breaks bad in Netflix action thriller Havoc (2)

Yeo, who has an extensive body of work in Malaysia and Singapore, both in theatre and on film, says shooting in Wales –including Cardiff, the region’s capital and its largest city –was special, despite the on-set Covid-19 restrictions in place in 2021.

“I love Wales so much. The weather was so good and the scenery was beautiful. We were very comfortable there. Actors got Sundays off, and we would go out. We watched a film – Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings (2021) – and also arranged a dim sum lunch at a restaurant,” says Yeo. She is married to Hong Kong action choreographer Ma Yuk Sing, in his 60s, and they have a 12-year-old daughter.

She did not share scenes with Hardy, but got to know Oscar-winning American actor Whitaker well after rehearsing and filming together.

There is a scene where Mother and Beaumont have a frank but tense conversation about their guilt as parents, after having failed to protect their children from harm.

Yeo says Whitaker, 63, was a veteran who needed very little time rehearsing– he arrived on set prepared and ready to go.

“We’d go through the lines once together, then we started shooting. He is a focused professional,” she recalls.

Like Yeo, Singaporean actor Pang was somewhat in awe of Whitaker.

Yeo Yann Yann breaks bad in Netflix action thriller Havoc (3)

“The best thing about filming Havoc was that I got to see the legend that is Forest Whitaker,” the 53-year-old tells ST in a separate Zoom call.

Pang has worked in a range of local and international productions, such as HBO Asia’s short film anthology about life in housing estates, Invisible Stories (2019), which also starred Yeo. He can also be seen in martial arts thrillers on Netflix, such as The Night Comes For Us (2018), directed by acclaimed Indonesian action-film-maker Timo Tjahjanto.

Pang jokes that he hoped that by touching Whitaker, the thespian’s skills might rub off on him. “I shook his hand on the first day. I think I tried to absorb all the power he had through that handshake.”

After hours, Whitaker was a down-to-earth guy who socialised with the cast, sharing meals and going to the bar to chat about films.

“We went to a small place to have drinks and a sit-down, to chill and take pictures. He paid for the drinks. I thought, ‘Wow’,” Pang says.

He and Evans became friends when Evans lived in Indonesia, after meeting through their mutual friend Tjahjanto. Following that, Evans wrote the gangster character Ching in Havoc with Pang in mind.

As for Yeo, the Wales-based film-maker added her to the cast after two casting directors – one in Hong Kong, the other in the United Kingdom – independently of each other mentioned her name.

Yeo Yann Yann breaks bad in Netflix action thriller Havoc (4)

“Two people on either side of the world suggested the same actor for the role,” recounts Evans, 45, in a separate Zoom call.

After watching her performance in Invisible Stories, in which she played a mother caring for an autistic son prone to violent outbursts, he was convinced.

“When I saw her in that, I thought, ‘Well, she’s going to handle the emotional depth that is required from (Havoc).’ And so we got on a call, discussed it and offered the role to her. She was an absolute joy to work with, just so lovely, so friendly to everyone, and held her own and delivered,” he says.

Instead of filming in the United States or Canada, Evans chose to turn parts of Wales into an unnamed crime-riddled American city filled with grimy alleyways, because he preferred sticking closer to home during the pandemic.

His team is used to transforming one world into another. When he was making The Raid 2 in Jakarta, he turned the Indonesian capital into a wintry locale by making it “snow”, he says.

“We started walking around places like Swansea and Cardiff, looking at every street, every alleyway and every building that let us get away with making it look like we were in America,” he adds.

For the big action set pieces, such as the wild car chase across the city, he created a virtual space in a computer, with cars, crashes and explosions drawn with software.

“They had to build every street, every bridge, every turn, every lamp fixture, every street light, everything from a computer graphics background,” he says.

His previous films expressed his love for the martial arts movies of Chinese greats Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung, and Thai action director and actor Panna Rittikrai, who was behind the fights in Tony Jaa classics Ong-Bak (2003) and Tom-Yum-Goong (2005).