The Daniels said they needed an actor who could do this, and they looked for him in a GIF of Short Round from a 1984 film. They found him. What they found was someone who had spent twenty-plus years learning, in different contexts and in different ways, exactly the kind of flexible, technically grounded, emotionally intelligent craft that the role required.
## The Fanny Pack and What It Represents
The specific physical vocabulary of Waymond Wang’s fight style in *Everything Everywhere All at Once* is worth a small detour, because it represents the kind of creative problem-solving that the film’s production consistently engaged in, and because Quan’s mastery of it was not incidental to the film’s success.
The weapon Waymond uses is, in the film’s primary universe, an ordinary fanny pack — the kind of travel accessory that has been the subject of derision and periodic revival depending on the decade. In the alpha universe, the fanny pack fight style has been developed into a martial art, the details of which the film presents with the specific straight-faced absurdism that defines the Daniels’ aesthetic.
The fight style required Quan to use the fanny pack as if it were a weighted rope dart — a weapon used in Chinese martial arts that requires precise control of momentum and trajectory. Wushu rope dart technique is demanding; translated to a fanny pack, it required weeks of training to master the specific physics of the prop and to make the movements look both convincing and funny and graceful simultaneously.