• Michelle Yeoh, 60, opened up about aging in a new interview.
  • The Everything Everywhere All at Once star hopes her action-packed role in the film inspires older women to be more adventurous.
  • “You get to be my age, and you can see it literally slipping through your fingers, because you are no longer that prime age,” she said.

Michelle Yeoh’s influential leading role in the sci-fi drama Everything Everywhere All at Once proved two things: that the Hollywood “sell-by date” for women is slowly but surely disappearing, and that, as Yeoh put it in a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, “older women can still have these crazy adventures!”

“If people learn nothing else from this movie,” she added. “I hope it’s that!”

In the trailer for the film, which released in March (also starring Jamie Lee Curtis), Yeoh, 60, is (literally) thrashed into another dimension, asked to save the multiverse. So she steps up and defends it with some badass fight scenes and choreography. Sure, it was all scripted, but the character empowered her real life, and she hopes it does the same for other women her age.

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“You know, you get to be my age, and you can see it literally slipping through your fingers, because you are no longer that prime age. The worst is when people think, ‘Oh, she doesn’t look like she did in her 20s, so she can’t physically do the same things,’” Yeoh said. “What they don’t understand is that I’ve learned some things over the years, and I’m more clever and smarter in how I can sustain my stamina. I’m as fit as I was before, because I know how to look after myself much better than when I was younger.”

With age comes wisdom, after all. Yeoh is simply applying it where it counts, especially in the form of exercise and meditation.

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“Before I even get out of bed, I start meditating and I do my mantra. I wake my body up slowly. I’ve had injuries over the years, so I have to rectify them,” she explained. “It starts from within. I tell my body, ‘I’m sorry. Forgive me of all the things I’ve done to you. And thank you.’”

After that, it’s on to stretching, core exercises, and either a hike through Runyon Canyon or a run on the elliptical machine.

Age, if anything, has rewarded Yeoh, as an actor and a person—which makes life feel a bit more free and well, adventurous. “I learned not to judge myself,” she said. “I learned to say, ‘What the heck.’”

Shouldn’t we all?

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Kayla Blanton

Kayla Blanton is a freelance writer-editor who covers health, nutrition, and lifestyle topics for various publications including Prevention, Everyday Health, SELF, People, and more. She’s always open to conversations about fueling up with flavorful dishes, busting beauty standards, and finding new, gentle ways to care for our bodies. She earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Ohio University with specializations in women, gender, and sexuality studies and public health, and is a born-and-raised midwesterner living in Cincinnati, Ohio with her husband and two spoiled kitties.