The “tax” Waymond — the version who exists in the primary timeline of the film — is meek, gentle, sometimes foolish-seeming, and achingly in love with his wife despite or perhaps because of the fact that she often treats him as an afterthought. He is a man who does not impose himself, who finds ways to care for people that do not announce themselves as acts of care, who keeps offering gentleness in a film that is largely about whether gentleness can survive in a universe of chaos.
The “alpha” Waymond — the version from an alternate universe where Evelyn’s choices went differently — is confident, assured, a practitioner of a fighting style that uses everyday objects as weapons. He is the action movie version of the same person: capable, directed, purposeful. He is what Waymond might have been in a different story, and the contrast between his certainty and tax Waymond’s uncertainty is one of the film’s central emotional mechanisms.
The “CEO” Waymond, the version associated with a universe where Evelyn’s laundromat became a successful business, is smooth and suited and slightly calculating in the way that successful executives often are. He is the aspirational version, the what-if version, the glimpse of a different path.
Playing all three required Quan to be able to move between these registers not just within the film but sometimes within scenes — to shift from the gentle husband to the skilled fighter to the corporate executive and back, in a way that remained coherent as the same underlying person rather than fragmenting into separate characters. His preparation — the animals on the wall, the body movement coach, the acting coach, the dialogue coach — was an attempt to make each version distinctly himself without losing the coherence of a single Waymond Wang underneath.