I grew up a karate geek.
I grew up doing martial arts.
My brother and I would reenact all the Bruce Lee movies.
And, you know, we would just reenact these fight scenes.
We have the wonderful Chris McGuire,
who was the captain of
orchestrating those fight sequences.
Whenever you're doing a fight sequence,
you always wanna go back to the story.
We purposely made the conscious decision
to make sure that the fight felt rough.
Not clean, messy.
And the reason why it felt messy is because our emotions
were hindering our physical movement.
Character-wise, they're two brothers
who haven't seen each other in quite some time.
And there's a lot of built-in resentment and whatnot.
When you have two very physical actors
in a very emotional scene,
every single beat of that fight needs to be choreographed.
When you're fighting with family,
and I can say this from experience, I have four brothers,
there's certain barriers that you can punch through
because you're family.
So in actuality, you go harder.
So we had to have the openness and the room
to really go hard for each other.
So in this fight sequence there are headbutts,
there are kicks, very heavy punches.
And I think it needs to be that raw,
it had to be 'cause you always want different fights
to have different textures.
And, again, it informs the story and the relationship
between these brothers.
And I really do hope that that translates on screen.
I love moving my body and I do some fighting outside,
not professional, but just doing some like kickboxing
or Muay Thai.
But to actually do it knowing that you are fighting
against somebody and embodying a character
that is fighting for their life
is a completely, completely different thing.
Your whole mind and body has to be in it.
You have to believe you're about to kill this person.
What we'll do is rehearse, rehearse, rehearse, rehearse.
It builds into their muscle memory
so that they're not having to think about
whether their left foot goes there, right foot goes there.
And then they can totally-safely of course-
immerse themselves in the character and let go.
But Chris is so good in terms of helping you
move the way your body naturally moves,
because not everybody fights the same way,
not everybody moves the same way.
I would throw a punch and he'd say,
"Oyin, really close your-
you're not gonna hit somebody like that.
Your fingers will break."
So you have to really be committed.
So we did a big sequence in Episode 10,
in the Mirror Universe,
where Georgiou has a fight with Mirror Burnham.
It's just you and me now, Mother.
Michelle is always very specific as to what she wants
and what she doesn't want in a sequence.
So in this particular sequence,
she wanted to be on the defensive the entire time.
She didn't want to throw a punch or kick
and she wanted it designed
so that she had absolutely no choice
but to kill Mirror Burnham at the end of the sequence.
So we design something.
Michelle comes in and she tells us what she likes
and what she doesn't like.
That's very exciting 'cause I've been a fan,
you know, growing up.
And then we sort of roll the camera and just sit back,
and I can guarantee you
you're gonna see something pretty special.