This interview contains spoilers for Warrior, now on Netflix.
For three seasons, Warrior has gifted us with countless hard-boiled lines of dialogue about staying in the fight. So, even after watching their show suffer through the worst that Hollywood has to offer – including the recent cancellation of the series at (HBO) Max after the show’s first cancellation at Cinemax – it only makes sense that the team behind Warrior would refuse to go down without a scrap. As the show moves to its new home on Netflix on February 16, Olivia Cheng and the rest of the cast and crew are digging deep to try and give the series the final season they feel it deserves.
Since its premiere in 2019, Warrior has built a diehard audience with its mix of historical fiction and martial arts. The show is set during the Tong Wars of the 1870s, where rival Chinese and Irish gangs battle for control over the booming city of San Francisco. In the show, Cheng plays Ah Toy, a madam and business owner who has earned the respect of the rival factions and uses her influence within Chinatown to pursue her dreams of a life outside the city. When Season 3 kicks off, we find Ah Toy coming into direct conflict with San Francisco’s titans of industry, who operate both within and outside the law to force Ah Toy to pick up her blade once more.
If this last season was supposed to be the grand resurrection of the show, the universe had other plans. The new season premiered on June 29; by July 13, SAG-AFTRA had announced its strike, and the cast of Warrior stepped away from all promotion of the show. “It’s one of those things that you kind of have to laugh about it otherwise you’re going to cry,” Olivia Cheng explains. “We’ve gone through two corporate mergers, two losses of contracts, a global pandemic, a historic strike.” Instead of creating buzz for the season, the cast could only watch the reactions from afar. “We could see people being really excited, but we couldn’t participate in that conversation, and we’ll never know what could have happened for us if not for that strike.”
Reflecting now on the third season of Warrior, Cheng is thoughtful about the challenges the cast faced in stepping back into characters they had walked away from years before. “No one’s ever really been in that position,” she explains, “to come back to a character that you laid to rest, that you did your best to say goodbye to.” To make matters worse, Cheng also found herself struggling to find an anchor for her performance in the aftermath of both a global pandemic and a wave of violence against Asian Americans that left her feeling “numb.”
While fans may have cheered as the character of Ah Toy resumed the mantle of the avenging angel from previous seasons – facing off against Adam Rayner’s tycoon Douglas Strickland in a final battle that was as satisfying as it was swift – Cheng herself struggled to find closure. “I think I was hoping that Warrior Season 3 would be more cathartic for me, the actor, than it was,” she admits. “And I think that actually parallels Ah Toy’s journey, because after that fight, she’s like, I still feel like shit.”
But now that the show has moved toNetflix, the cast of Warrior has rallied again, turning to social media and launching their own media blitz in the hope that Netflix might renew the show for Season 4. After suffering the ups and downs of the industry for three seasons, how does the Warrior cast still have it in them to fight for another season?
“There’s a part of all of us artistically that [wants] a second go because we don’t feel satisfied with what we experienced in Season 3,” Cheng explains. According to the actor, it is the very hardships the cast has experienced over the years that lead them to believe they have unfinished business with the show. Cheng describes the cast as being “ferocious guardians” of their characters and very aware of the place Warrior occupies in the legacy of Bruce Lee. “If we’re going to say goodbye, we really want to say goodbye on our terms.”
And renewal or not, ideas are already swirling for a new season. For Cheng, much of the potential of a Season 4 can be found in alliances formed or fractured – including the fallout for Andrew Koji’s Ah Sahm, who finally chooses blood over loyalty when it matters most. But there are also unexplored relationships onscreen that she would like to see. “Dean thinks Ah Toy is the most dangerous one,” Cheng says, referencing costar Dean Jagger, who plays Irish agitator Dylan Leary. “It’d be interesting to finally have scenes with Dean where it’s Ah Toy versus Leary. It’s kind of setting the stage, maybe, for that.”
Perhaps one of the biggest things that Cheng would like to see in any new season is the return of Joanna Vanderham’s Penelope Blake. “The Blake sisters were a casualty of the second corporate merger that kicked in as we were about to start production,” Cheng explains, noting that the writers had a “whole kick-ass storyline” in place, and that the two actresses were “literally getting their fittings in London” when the merger was finalized. “They are so beloved by the Warrior family,” she adds, noting that there’s “so much that we could still come back to” should the stars line up right for a return.
But ultimately, another season of Warrior offers the promise to work once more with a cast and crew that continue to care about each other deeply. “This is our chance to have that time with each other, and it’s our chance to do right by Bruce Lee,” Cheng explains. “ It’s the Year of the Dragon. Maybe the timing of this is fortuitous in a way that we could never have contrived.”
So while diehard Warrior fans might carry the scars of near-death experiences and production upheavals, Cheng is excited for the clean slate the series will have with a new wave of fans on Netflix. “We want the audiences to get swept up in our world,” Cheng concludes, “in the humanity and the absolute flaws and contradictions of all our characters. To just fall in love with us, and fall in love with the world that we have gone into painstaking detail to create.” If Warrior continues to practice what it preaches about resilience, it may still be too early to count the series as down and out.
