Andrew Cooper/© 2018 CTMG, Inc. All Rights Reserved.(LOS ANGELES) — Shannon Lee, the daughter of the late martial arts legend Bruce Lee, is not pleased with the portrayal of her father in the hit Quentin Tarantino film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Actor Mike Moh plays Bruce Lee in the film, and at one point, he ends up getting into a physical fight with Brad Pitt’s character after they trade a series of boasts about who’s more dangerous. “My hands are registered as lethal weapons,” Lee says in the film.
According to The Wrap, Lee said it was “disheartening” to see her father depicted as “an arrogant a–hole who was full of hot air.”
“I can understand…that the two characters are antiheroes and this is sort of like a rage fantasy of what would happen…and they’re portraying a period of time that clearly had a lot of racism and exclusion,” Ms. Lee said.
“I understand they want to make the Brad Pitt character this super bad-a** who could beat up Bruce Lee,” she continued. “But they didn’t need to treat him in the way that white Hollywood did when he was alive.”
For all his still-unmatched martial arts talent, Bruce Lee struggled to make a name for himself in Hollywood; he famously lost the main role in Kung-Fu to a white man, David Carradine, and was relegated to playing a sidekick in the superhero show The Green Hornet.
It was only in 1973 that his potential as a producer and a leading man was appreciated by Hollywood thanks to Enter The Dragon, but that film was released a month after his untimely death.
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