Shannon Lee says she’s saddened by the way director Quentin Tarantino has portrayed her martial arts superstar father in the new film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,
In the film (spoilers ahead), the Bruce Lee character, played by actor Mike Moh, challenges Brad Pitt’s stuntman to a best-of-three-rounds fight. Each character wins one round, but it’s implied that Pitt’s character gets the better of the kung fu icon.
Lee, the only daughter of Bruce Lee and Linda Lee Caldwell, told The Wrap that it was “disheartening” to see her father characterized as an “arrogant a**hole.”
“I can understand all the reasoning behind what is portrayed in the movie,” she said. “I 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.”
She added: “I understand they want to make the Brad Pitt character this super bad-ass who could beat up Bruce Lee. But they didn’t need to treat him in the way that white Hollywood did when he was alive.”
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Lee was reportedly not consulted by Tarantino for the film, which portrayed her father in the 1960s on the set of The Green Hornet. Bruce Lee memorably played the character of Kato in the series.
“He comes across as an arrogant asshole who was full of hot air,” she told The Wrap. “And not someone who had to fight triple as hard as any of those people did to accomplish what was naturally given to so many others.”
Shannon Lee saw the film on Sunday. She said her father was often challenged and tried to avoid fights.
“It was really uncomfortable to sit in the theater and listen to people laugh at my father,” she said.
“Here, he’s the one with all the puffery and he’s the one challenging Brad Pitt. Which is not how he was.”
“What I’m interested in is raising the consciousness of who Bruce Lee was as a human being and how he lived his life,” she said. “All of that was flushed down the toilet in this portrayal, and made my father into this arrogant punching bag.”
