Evelyn Wang, in the film, is played by Michelle Yeoh — one of the most acclaimed action stars in the history of Hong Kong and international cinema, and an actor who had faced her own version of the Hollywood visibility problem throughout her career. The film’s female lead is Evelyn Wang, and the film is largely about her interior life and choices. Waymond, her husband, is the person who keeps believing in her even when she cannot believe in herself. The dynamic was, in some ways, not entirely unlike the dynamic between the part of Quan that had kept a small flame of hope alive across twenty-plus years and the part of him that had concluded nothing was going to change.
## What the Film Did
*Everything Everywhere All at Once* was released theatrically in March 2022. The response was unlike what anyone — including Quan — had expected.
The film’s critical reception was rapturous. Reviewers reached for language that went beyond conventional praise, describing a work that somehow managed to be a martial arts film, a multiverse adventure, a family drama, a tax-season comedy, a meditation on nihilism and meaning, and a cry of love for humanity in its most bewildered and imperfect state — all at once. The emotional core, many reviewers agreed, was Waymond Wang: the husband who keeps telling his wife the universe is big enough to absorb their failure, who keeps choosing gentleness when the script would let him choose anger, who makes the argument for kindness not as a slogan but as an act of will.