Yao brings the Southeast Asian experience to Ryan Coogler's horror movie Sinners (2025)

SINGAPORE – In the horror thriller Sinners, in a dream-like musical sequence set in a 1930s music hall, the cultures of the American South, both past and present, swirl about on the dance floor, moving to the same beat.

Among the African musicians, dancers and blues players of the 1930s, moviegoers will see figures from Chinese opera. In the troupe is a dancer in costume as Sun Wukong, the mythological Monkey King.

Malaysian actor Yao, who plays grocer Bo Chow in his Hollywood movie debut, was asked by the creative team to propose iconic figures that the Asian diaspora would recognise.

“I wanted to name someone who would be known by people from Vietnam and the Philippines, the whole region, not just China. So it had to be Sun Wukong,” says Yao, speaking to The Straits Times on a Zoom call from his home in Brooklyn, New York.

It was set up quickly. The team found a martial arts performer familiar with the opera dance movements of the Monkey King. Not only was the make-up artist familiar with the design, but the team was also eager to do it.

“I grew up watching the mythical epics on TV, so it was really cool to see a bit of home in the movie,” adds the 34-year-old, whose mother is Filipino and father Chinese.

He also suggested that his character, as someone with Chinese roots, could wear a gold Taoist amulet for good luck. Bo wears the necklace in the film, though it can be seen only partially.

Set in the segregated American South in 1932, Sinners features a Chinese family running two grocery stores – one in the black part of town and another in the white zone, a few steps away.

Opening in Singapore cinemas on April 17, the movie tells the story of racist oppression through the lens of horror and music, with the action seen through the eyes of former gangsters and twin brothers Smoke and Stack, played by American actor Michael B. Jordan.

Sinners’ American writer-director Ryan Coogler (Creed, 2015; Black Panther, 2018) included the characters of Bo and his wife Grace (Shanghai-born American actress Li Jun Li) because he wanted to point out that the South has long been a melting pot of cultures – and being neither black nor white was an advantage in doing business.

Yao – whose real name is Thomas Pang – is a 2015 graduate of Lasalle College of the Arts who was prominent in Singapore’s theatre and film scene, earning three Best Actor nominations in The Straits Times Life Theatre Awards, and winning it in 2018 for his performance in Hand To God by Singapore Repertory Theatre.

“I auditioned for Bo on a video call in 2024, when I was in Singapore, from an HDB flat in Labrador Park,” says Yao, who was in town at the time working on a film project.

It was interesting for him to see how an actor like Jordan changed his body language and speech patterns to play either the more laid-back Smoke or edgier Stack.

“Mike worked with very specific energies. When he was Stack, you could definitely feel he was Stack. When he was Smoke, the room slowed down a little bit,” Yao says.

The stage name Yao is derived from his Chinese name, and using it “honours the great-grandfather who gave it to me, and it’s a great word to say as well”, referring to its lively, expressive sound.

His Singapore films include the satire #LookAtMe (2022) and drama-comedy Tiong Bahru Social Club (2020).

Yao remained in the United States after obtaining a Master of Fine Arts degree in 2023 from the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University in Connecticut, not far from his current home in New York.

“I went to Yale because I wanted to better myself as an actor. Also, I wanted to try to find cross-cultural work in America, as well as back in Asia. I’m always interested in continuing to work in South-east Asia. I had the huge privilege and honour to cut my teeth in the Singapore theatre scene.”

He worked with an accent coach to perfect Bo’s Southern speech patterns. As people who lived between worlds, Bo and Grace would code-switch, depending on whether they were conversing with white or black speakers. Also, Grace ran the store in the white part of town and Bo ran the one in the black area.

“Because of her associations with white people, she would take on more of their dialect, and I would take on the dialect of the black people. There would be that subtle code-switching that immigrants do, and what Chinese people have to do wherever they go,” he says.

To make sure the storytelling was authentic, the Sinners team worked with Chinese-American documentary-maker Dolly Li, who produced The Untold Story Of America’s Southern Chinese (2017). It details the lives of a small group of Chinese who found their niche selling groceries and farming in the Mississippi Delta.

According to the documentary, they arrived in the region more than a century ago as cotton field labourers, replacing the slaves freed after the American Civil War, and were considered “cheap, disposable and politically voiceless”.

Many later left the fields to set up grocery stores. Today, their descendants have mostly decamped for other parts of the country.

As Bo’s experience in Sinners shows, Yao thinks that, often, it is up to an individual to choose between feeling like he or she belongs and feeling like an outsider.

“You might be the only one at the party who looks like you, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have a good time.”

Sinners opens in Singapore cinemas on April 17.

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