Stephen Chow, the Kung Fu Hustle star who quit acting and keeps remaking himself

Stephen Chow

Photo: Kit Liew / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	June 22, 1962 Hong Kong
Occupation	Actor and film director
Known for	Kung Fu Hustle, Shaolin Soccer, CJ7
Awards	3 Golden Horse · 4 Hong Kong Film

Stephen Chow’s face is still on the poster, and he is nowhere in the film. Kung Fu Soccer, his comedy about a scrappy women’s football team called Emei, was sold across China on the name of the man who once played a washed-up kung fu master turned striker in Shaolin Soccer. On screen, the boots belong to Zhang Xiaofei, Dilraba Dilmurat and Lay Zhang. Chow stays behind the monitor. Audiences paid for the brand in their millions. Reviewers in Hong Kong and London, meanwhile, wrote that they had seen this film already, and that he had made it better the first time.

That gap, between a public that keeps buying Stephen Chow and a filmmaker who seems unsure what to do with him except repeat him, is the live question of his career. It is also a reversal. For most of his working life he was ahead of his audience, and the audience caught up years later.

Chow Sing-chi grew up in Hong Kong, where he was born on 22 June 1962 to a mother, Ling Po-yee, who raised him and his two sisters after his parents divorced when he was seven. A Bruce Lee film, seen at nine, gave him his first ambition. The second came through a door that shut in his face. When he and his friend Tony Leung Chiu-wai applied to TVB’s actor-training course, Leung was taken and Chow was turned away; he got in on a later intake, in 1982, and spent about five years presenting the children’s programme 430 Space Shuttle, a job that taught him to hold a camera with timing alone.

Cinema found him through a serious part. As a young offender in Danny Lee’s police drama Final Justice he won the Golden Horse award for best supporting actor in 1988, and The Justice of Life the following year paired him for the first time with Ng Man-tat, the long-suffering foil who would stand beside him in film after film. Then came All for the Winner, a 1990 parody of the gambling thrillers then filling Hong Kong screens, which became the biggest local hit in the territory’s history to that point. His style acquired a name, mo lei tau, Cantonese for nonsense: a machine-gun comedy of puns and deadpan non sequiturs built on the rhythm of Cantonese street talk.

He was soon directing in everything but the credits. Fight Back to School sent him undercover as a policeman in a secondary school; on Flirting Scholar, a costume farce, he was the de facto director. His first official credit arrived with From Beijing with Love, a Bond spoof he co-directed with Lee Lik-chi in 1994.

The film that best explains him was a failure. A Chinese Odyssey, the two-part riff on Journey to the West that Jeff Lau directed with Chow as the Monkey King, flopped in Hong Kong in 1995 and helped push his production company, Choi Sing, into bankruptcy. Years later it was rediscovered on the Chinese mainland, where its lines became the raw material of early internet culture, a delayed canonisation so complete that the press coined a term for it, the Stephen Chow phenomenon. The lesson he appears to have absorbed is that his audience would always arrive eventually. The question was whether he could build films sturdy enough to wait for it.

God of Cookery in 1996 and King of Comedy in 1999, the story of a film extra desperate to be taken seriously as an actor, read now as his most personal work. Shaolin Soccer took the method international in 2001: Shaolin kung fu brothers reborn as a football team, with Chow winning best film, best director, best actor and best new director at the Hong Kong Film Awards and the film earning more than 50 million dollars worldwide. Kung Fu Hustle went further in 2004. It grossed over 106 million dollars, won best film and best director at the Golden Horse awards, and earned nominations for the Golden Globe and the BAFTA for foreign-language film.

Then he stepped out of the frame. CJ7, the 2008 story of a poor father and an alien toy, was his last role. As a director working in Mandarin for mainland audiences he became, if anything, more powerful: Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons, co-directed with Derek Kwok in 2013, was briefly the highest-grossing Chinese film ever made, and The Mermaid topped China’s box office in 2016 on its way past 550 million dollars worldwide.

The less flattering portrait comes from inside the industry. Former collaborators, Johnnie To and Ng Man-tat, who died in 2021, among them, have at various points described him as selfish or autocratic, and he has fallen out with Wong Jing and Sammo Hung. The control that made his comedy precise had a cost, and his colleagues paid it. The second complaint is newer and comes from his audience. The New King of Comedy in 2019 remade his own King of Comedy; he wrote and produced a sequel to Conquering the Demons; by 2024 Chinese social media was accusing him of living off his catalogue. He had half-conceded the point at a promotional event in 2019: my time has passed, he said.

His private life reached the public mainly through a courtroom. Alice Yu Man-fung, his partner for more than a decade until 2010, sued him in 2012 over an alleged verbal profit-sharing agreement, seeking about 80 million Hong Kong dollars. The courts ruled against her in 2021, and the decision was upheld on appeal.

The recent work has moved on two tracks. In 2024 Chow signed an exclusive deal with Douyin to produce microdramas under the label 9527, the servant number his character adopts in Flirting Scholar; the first, Golden Pigs and Jade Leaves, told a story of online fraud in five-minute episodes. The other was Kung Fu Soccer, shot in Shenzhen in 2025 on a budget of 380 million yuan, the most expensive of his career. It opened in mainland China on 11 July 2026 with 500 million yuan in its first weekend and had passed 2.3 billion yuan by early October, when it moved to Chinese streaming platforms. The South China Morning Post gave it two stars out of five; Screen Daily complained of outdated jokes and lazy special effects. In South Korea, a fictional rival side whose name recalls a Seoul women’s university, drawn as cheats obsessed with their looks, drew public criticism.

No new film has been announced. The useful question is no longer whether audiences will show up for Stephen Chow, because Kung Fu Soccer answered it on its opening weekend. It is whether he will make something his younger self would not recognise. A Chinese Odyssey needed years to be understood. Kung Fu Soccer was understood at once, and that may be the problem.

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