Michelle Yeoh explains the weird worlds of Everything Everywhere All At Once

Action-packed, epic science fiction adventure Everything, Everywhere at the Same TimeIt transcends space and time, and can leap across many universes. With so much happening — one could say, so much happening everywhere, all at once — it’s prime for a breakdown of what’s going on. Michelle Yeoh, a long-time superstar in martial arts, is the perfect person to lead us through the multiverse.

Yeoh stars as Evelyn, an ordinary woman who’s just trying to get through an IRS audit of the family laundromat. The marriage she has with Waymond (Ke HuyQuan) is in turmoil, as well as her relationship with Joy (Stephanie Hsu), her father James Hong and both her daughters. Evelyn gets sucked in to a multiverse-hopping adventure during an IRS appointment.

Yeoh is Evelyn’s guide through the emotional rollercoaster ride across different realities. Yeoh sat down with Polygon to dive into some of her favorites among these alternate timelines and lifetimes, and to share some insight on what it was like wriggling hot-dog fingers in Jamie Lee Curtis’ face.

[Ed. note: Major spoilers ahead for Everything Everywhere All At Once.]

Evelyn’s movie-star universe

Image: A24

One of the first alternate timelines in the movie presents the life Evelyn would’ve lived if she hadn’t run off to America with Waymond when they were both young. Alternative-Evelyn is rejected by Waymond, and she’s mugged briefly by one of the film’s directors. She soon trains in martial art, and rises to fame in Hollywood. There are obvious parallels between Evelyn’s world and Michelle Yeoh’s real life. However, even though Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan intended the joke as a metatextual nod to Yeoh, Yeoh insisted that Evelyn be kept separate from her as actress.

“When the Daniels started, they always wrote [her] name as Michelle Wang,” explains Yeoh. “And I said no, right from the get-go. Michelle is not her real name. […]Evelyn is worthy of her own tale. This mother is not like everyone else. [and] housewife who is trying her best to be a good mother to her daughter, a good daughter to her father, a wife that’s trying to keep the family together […] I don’t like to integrate me, Michelle Yeoh, into the characters that I play, because they all deserve their own journey and their stories to be told.”

Evelyn’s journey grapples not just with the multiverse and the forces of nihilism, but also with her splintering relationships and the constant battle of “what-ifs” she feels within herself. When presented with a version of herself with fame, fortune, and renown, Evelyn is initially drawn to the success she could’ve had if she had just said no to Waymond all those years ago.

“She became a big movie actress, she became very glamorous,” Yeoh says. “But then she lost the things that she loved. She doesn’t have a family. And the worst, she doesn’t have a daughter.”

The universe of hot-dog fingers

Image: A24

“Honestly, the truth is, when I first read it, I said, Well, I’m gonna have to find some way to tell these two boys that’s going out of the script,” Yeoh laughs. In this universe, human evolution took a drastically different turn, for reasons also covered with a director’s cameo. All people in the world have long, rubbery fingers. “[I had] no idea what they’re even talking about — mustard splurting out [of] hot-dog fingers in mouths, like Nuh-uh, no no.”

And those rubbery hot dog appendages weren’t green-screen graphics — they were very, very real. Yeoh denies any use of CG. Everything is Everywhere The purpose of the hot-dog fingers was to enhance and create elements, rather than to make new ones. Hot-dog fingers were created for actors.

“I had to stick my hand into this tub of wax, and I had hickeys on my knuckles,” she says. “Because they got sucked in and wouldn’t come out. It was funny, I thought. No! I’m gonna have to walk around for the rest of my life with this tub at the end of my hand!”

Image: A24

In the hot-dog finger universe, Evelyn is romantically involved with Deirdre (Jamie Lee Curtis), the IRS agent who is investigating her in Evelyn’s original universe. Their intimate relationship is shown in glimpses. They are pretty normal and regular scenes of a couple falling for each other, with the exception of hot-dog fingers moving around. In the hot-dog universe, passion is expressed by people shoving those fingers into each other’s mouths, in a kind of dance performance.

“When you do a dance like that, you need a fearless partner,” says Yeoh, referring to Curtis’ undaunted approach to the scene. “You both have to look at each other and go, These are your hot-dog fingers! We literally improvised this dance with each other.”

But even the best partner doesn’t quell the initial anxiety of performing an erotic hot-dog-finger dance.

“Before you do it, you have so many weird thoughts,” recounts Yeoh. “How is it going to work out? You know, it’s going to be so embarrassing. I have not been embarrassed in, like — I’ve managed to keep it together for 30-something years in the business. Am I just gonna lose it right now?”

Even though the hot-dog dance may seem absurd, Evelyn and Deirdre’s performance is almost sweet. This is a testament to their ability to bring gravitas to an absurd act.

“You feel the love of these two,” says Yeoh. “So that’s why it doesn’t become just silly. It’s what you want to see happen. This is what you want. They are experiencing pain and separation. And then them coming together is like breakup sex.”

Harry Shum Jr.’s big-secret universe

Image: A24

Evelyn works alongside Chad as a hibachi-chef in this universe.Glee’s Harry Shum Jr.). Evelyn’s boss tells her to step up her pace, because her chef skills are slacking and Chad is stealing the show. But chef-Evelyn walks in on Chad in the kitchen and finds that beneath his hat, he’s being controlled by a singing, cooking raccoon, in a parody of Pixar’s Ratatouille.

“[Harry Shum Jr.] is so brilliant with his body language, with that little raccoon,” says Yeoh. “It looked like a real raccoon. It scared the hell out of me the first time I saw it, and then when he’s doing that, Oh, I’m being controlled by this raccoon, ahhh!It was so much fun. We had so much fun because it was an actual robot [animatronic]On his head it pulled, while someone controlled its mouth. It seems so real. It was scary.”

It’s also one of the movie’s most hilarious and satisfying long cons, because earlier in the real world, Evelyn tries to explain the whole multiverse-hopping conundrum to her family by equating it to Ratatouille — only she confuses the rat for a raccoon, and calls it “Racca-coony.” Acting alongside an animatronic raccoon really tested Yeoh’s acting chops, but she says the scene where Evelyn explains the plot of Racca-coonyThis was a very satisfying challenge.

“I don’t do comedy! I don’t do stand-up comedy. I don’t do it!” she laughs. “There’s no ego in this room. You are allowed to laugh and have fun. It was part of the appeal to not have to think.This could make it look strange. It’s like, let it be weird and wonderful.”

Image: A24

The universe where life doesn’t exist

There are many chaotic universes, but this is the best. Everything, Everywhere at the Same TimeYeoh finds one particular attraction: The universe that has no life, Evelyn, her daughter, take on the shape of rocks gazing into a canyon.

“I love the rock universe,” says Yeoh. “And I want to take credit for this. It’s because I told Daniels. Don’t make us do voiceovers for the rocks.The wind must not be heard, or else it would. It can hear all the sounds of wind. They were brilliant in creating the [makes a TCK-TCK-TCK noise]The words finally came out. I thought that was brilliant.”

Some of the movie’s most pivotal conversations happen between the rock versions of Evelyn and Joy, all through onscreen text as the wind whistles around them. It’s the perfect pause in the movie, which punctuates the points with even more precision and profundity.

“The movie is fast and furious and chaotic,” Yeoh says. “It’s like pop art and pop music and all these things happening at the same time. But it’s also very much the world that you [millennials] all are used to — with the internet, the overload of information. And then suddenly from there, you jump to the rock universe, it’s like, We can now all breathe together.The stillness makes chaos seem even more apparent, I believe. You can see the beauty in it, when you leave the cinema. Look around us, it’s so chaotic the whole time.We need to learn to look back at ourselves and to say: How do we heal ourselves? What can we do to make it work? You need to reflect upon it, and you need to do it together.”