How Bruce Lee-inspired series Warrior gave Hong Kong actor Jason Tobin a second life

“It was my dad, a British expat, who introduced me to Bruce Lee,” says Jason Tobin, still sweaty after a workout at ATP gym, in Central. “He wanted me to have an Asian male role model. To see an Asian role model.”

The 45-year-old actor is hardly alone in revering his­tory’s most famous martial artist. Tobin is, however, unique in bringing to life a role Lee himself failed to get onto the screen before break­ing Hollywood’s Asian ceiling with Enter the Dragon (1973). Cinemax’s runaway hit series Warrior – season two just wrapped – is a story Lee wrote before Tobin was even born.

Fifty years ago, Hollywood was less multicultural than today, making 2019 “the right time and place for Lee’s vision to come to thrilling life”, raved Rolling Stone’s review of season one. “Even if he’s not around to star in it.”

Warrior’s plot is well known to Lee fans: set in the 1870s, during the Tong wars, as rival Chinatown gangs sought territory in burgeoning American cities, a Chinese immi­grant skilled in martial arts heads to San Francisco looking for his sister, who is fleeing an abusive husband in China.

Just how much 1970s television classic Kung Fu, which starred David Carradine as a Shaolin monk wandering the American West, borrowed from the original concept remains hotly debated. Lee’s widow, Linda, has said Warner executives, fearing audiences weren’t ready for an Asian hero, took the idea and cast a Caucasian lead.

Tobin is no stranger to this story. Born in Hong Kong to an English father and Chinese mother, and attending schools in Britain and the Philippines, as well as Hong Kong, he knows a thing or two about racial politics. Aside from pursuing his burgeoning interest in acting, he took up karate to fend off bullies. In Essex, he says, “It was easy for a young Chinese kid in an all-white boarding school to get picked on.”