Ben Yuen

Ben Yuen Fu-wah is a Hong Kong actor who built his career primarily on the stage before moving into film. He joined the Chung Ying Theatre Company as a full time performer in 1988 and worked there as an actor, playwright and director, taking part in more than one hundred productions, among them a Cantonese staging of Macbeth presented at Shakespeare’s Globe in London and later toured in Europe. In 2009 he returned to study at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts School of Drama, receiving a Master of Fine Arts in directing in 2011. His screen career began in the mid 1990s with supporting parts in films such as The Mad Phoenix and King of Comedy. In 2018 he played Tan in Tracey, winning the Golden Horse Award and the Hong Kong Film Award for Best Supporting Actor. He took the leading role of Hoi in Ray Yeung’s Twilight’s Kiss in 2019, and has since appeared in Raging Fire and The Pig, the Snake and the Pigeon.

He applied to the Sha Tin Drama Group as an actor in 1985, teaching himself at first, and joined the Chung Ying Theatre Company in 1988 as a full time performer, where he also worked as a playwright and a director. He studied while working, and much later returned to formal education at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts School of Drama in 2009, taking a Master of Arts in Directing in 2011. By the time of his Golden Horse win he had performed in more than a hundred stage productions.

For Tracey (翠絲, 2018), in which he played an older Cantonese opera performer, he undertook four months of Cantonese opera training. He has said the physical habit stayed with him afterwards, describing muscle memory that continued to shape the rhythm of his speech. For a 2023 role as a man with a mild intellectual disability, he and his team carried out research by talking to people with mild intellectual disabilities, and, finding their inner lives genuinely hard to read, worked instead from close observation of behaviour and bearing before deciding how to play it.

In his own words. "It is because I am doing the thing I love. Every time I come to rehearse I find myself laughing the whole way through." (Interview with the Hong Kong Economic Journal (信報財經新聞), 13 December 2018, shortly after his Golden Horse win.) "I have always felt that my roots are on the stage, and because of that there are things I have to do even better." (Interview with the Hong Kong Economic Journal, 13 December 2018, on the relationship between his theatre work and his screen work.) "Acting is my faith. I cannot fail it." (Interview with the Hong Kong Economic Journal, 13 December 2018.) "An actor does not only copy what is on the outside. Being able to copy the person's inner life is what matters most. A monkey can imitate its master smoking, but it is still a monkey, because it cannot imitate what is inside the master." (Interview with Ming Pao Weekly (明周娛樂), 15 September 2023, on his working method.) "A part that looks perfectly unremarkable is in fact the harder one to do." (Interview with Ming Pao Weekly, 15 September 2023.)