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A few months later, Kenny relocated to Los Angeles to become an actor. Today, five and a half years later, the award-winning Chinese martial artist (specializing in open hand, Chinese broadsword and staff)/international actor is best known for his role as Gohan in Dragonball Z: Light of Hope, a live-action adaptation of the legendary anime show. "Anime fans haven't seen their shows faithfully adapted, and we really pulled out the stops in getting the characters, the world, and the DBZ-style action right. Based on the fans' reaction, we did! It feels great being an Asian superhero! This was filmed years before Shang- Chi, before Crazy Rich Asians. Asian representation was especially lacking then, and it was incredible having kids/ DBZ fans look up to you as a different kind of hero than what's out there," says Kenny. Kenny has also appeared in a number of television shows, including NCIS, NCIS:LA and The Player, and has portrayed several real life people. Recently, Kenny portrayed Zhu Xuesan, a heroic schoolteacher in rural China during WWII, in the film, Midway, Released in theaters last month, Midway's cast includes Woody Harrelson, Dennis Quaid, and Mandy Moore. Tell me about Midway and what it was like working on it? Kenny Leu: It's the true story leading up to the Battle of Midway —the fight that turned the tide for America against Japan in World War II. What's so special about the film is how they captured the insanity of what it was like to be an aircraft carrier pilot back then. These guys were flying these clanky, unreliable death machines, landing on a tiny, moving strip in the middle of an ocean. Not to mention, they also had to shoot each other out of the sky! I saw an early screening of it, and the action is exactly what I dreamed air combat could look like on the big screen. I nearly jumped out of my seat; I was so thrilled. But it also stayed very true to how it was out of combat. I've been a WWII aviation fanboy since I was a kid. And many of the stories I've read about, I saw in this movie. Many of those guys died not from enemy fire, but because they crashed trying to land. It was an insane time. Roland Emmerich also directed Independence Day, one of my favorite feel-good blockbusters of all-time, but this one's different. I've been a part of authentic military stories before, The Long Road Home in 2017, and he's done an incredible job honoring the men — American and Japanese— who fought in that war. He made me real proud to show this film to not only my veteran friends, but my Japanese friends, too. Zhu Xuesan was a real-life war hero, how did you prepare for this role? KL: Zhu Xuesan was a poor schoolteacher who lived in a village in China. Doolittle [portrayed by Aaron Eckhart], a famous American pilot, crash lands in Zhu's village, after his team is sent on a suicide mission to bomb Tokyo to get Japan back for Pearl Harbor. The Chinese army was about to execute him because they thought Doolittle was a German spy. Doolittle was in bad condition; he had just survived this crazy mission, had no food, water, and worst of all, couldn't speak any Chinese! Zhu hears about this and being the only guy to speak any English for hundreds of miles, rushes his way over, intervenes, and ends up saving Doolittle, not only from execution, but nursing him and his men back to health and getting them back to American territory. Doolittle went right back into the fight and became a pivotal part of the U.S. winning the war. So Zhu is a special kind of hero. He was not a hero that fought. He was only a schoolteacher, but his courage to step out of that, would save many lives. Preparing for this role was fun because Zhu spoke a very distinct dialect of Chinese, so I had to prepare my Chinese to have that accent. Then, I had to prepare my English to speak in an accent reflective of that dialect. Two accents for two languages, in one role! You're also the lead in the indie, A Shot Through the Wall. This is another real-life role, how did you land this part? KL: A Shot Through the Wall is inspired by a real-life case. In New York, an Asian American rookie cop on patrol named Peter Liang accidentally shoots and kills a black man. This case truly was an accident, it was an accidental discharge into a dark stairwell. The bullet ricochets off a wall, strikes and kills a man a floor lower that Peter didn't even know was there. In the context of many cases of much more obvious police brutality, the Asian American kid is the only one to get indicted by a grand jury. The Asian American community goes into an uproar over this, in the midst of the black community saying, "Stop killing us" and the police saying, "We're just trying to do our best." This movie takes a similar circumstance and explores it. I play the Asian American cop, and we see how an Asian American family copes with the fallout. I auditioned for this while I was still shooting The Long Road Home. I was playing a soldier, and I got to play with a .50 cal machine gun —a gun as long as your arm and bullets as long as your fist is wide. When you fired this thing, you could feel it shake your soul. Not because it's firing in your hands, it's usually mounted to a vehicle, but because of the air vibration. It's terrifyingly powerful. And on The Long Road Home, there is a horrific part of the story where the American soldiers are forced to fire cases of these bullets into rows of women and children. As an actor, it was my job to vividly imagine them be decimated. From there, it wasn't difficult for me to imagine the horror of accidentally killing someone with your own gun. Additionally, you did fight choreography in Warner Bros. feature Yakuza Princess, what was the most challenging part about that? KL: The most difficult part was having to fight and act with my wife, Masumi, on camera. We had gotten married two days before we left for Brazil, where we shot Yakuza Princess. It was her first role ever. They were teaching her to be an action hero: stunt fighting, swordplay, falls. I really didn't want her to get hurt, so I trained her thoroughly myself. I'm an actor, but I have a lot of experience doing stunts, action choreography, teaching, and competing. We worked our butts off, and it really paid off! It was a challenge getting someone with limited experience to look sharp and clean after only a month or so of training. But she did it, and I'm really proud of her. So then when I was asked to choreograph and perform our fight, I had a lot of things on my mind. It had to be good, because what a great thing