Tzi Ma makes fathers and authority figures feel like people with more on their minds than they are prepared to say. We value his warmth and restraint most when a film gives him time to use them.
Fi1m perspective
In The Farewell (2019), Tzi Ma's Haiyan is among relatives trying to conceal feelings they have good reason to show. The family has arranged a fake wedding. Ma brings warmth and humour to the father, helping the deception feel like something people might actually undertake. We were moved by the effort of ordinary conversation, with Nai Nai present and her relatives already preparing to miss her. The actors let us recognise the affection without making the arrangement easy to approve of.
The fathers and officials recur, but the parts have not always given him much to work with. Through the 1980s and 1990s, he was often confined to stereotyped or token roles. Consul Han in Rush Hour (1998) brought mainstream visibility; General Shang in Denis Villeneuve's Arrival (2016) brought wider recognition. We admire Arrival's patient attention to communication, though its wider crisis is less convincing. Amy Adams's Louise Banks is its centre, and it is not the film we would choose to show how much Ma can do.
Lulu Wang gives him more to do in The Farewell. Ma has room for warmth and humour within an ensemble whose members differ in how well they conceal their feelings. Editors Michael Taylor and Matthew Friedman let the exchanges move between amusement and distress without insisting that every hesitation deserves special attention. That suits an actor whose small reactions can carry emotion without much dialogue. The script sometimes explains the family's thinking too neatly, when the faces have already made its difficulties plain.
The shift to a central role in Tigertail (2020), as immigrant father Pin-Jui, gave that quiet acting more space. It was his first feature lead, a useful correction to years spent supporting other people's stories. Hua Zhou in Mulan (2020) continued the run of fathers. We would welcome more parts outside that category. Start with The Farewell, provided you can tolerate a family explaining itself a little more often than it needs to.
Biography
Tzi Ma is a Hong Kong-American actor. Born in Hong Kong in 1962, he was raised in Staten Island, New York, after his family moved there. He began his career in New York theatre during the 1970s and made early screen appearances including in the film Cocaine Cowboys (1978).
Ma is known for film roles including Consul Han in the Rush Hour series (1998 and 2007), General Shang in Arrival (2016), Haiyan in The Farewell (2019), and Hua Zhou in Mulan (2020). On television he has appeared in recurring roles in series including 24, The Man in the High Castle and Kung Fu (2021–2023). He has also worked in independent films such as Tigertail (2020).
