Daniel Wu
Biography
Daniel Wu is an American actor, director, producer and racing driver of Chinese descent, born on September 30, 1974 in Berkeley, California, USA, and is a third-generation Chinese American. He grew up in Oakland in the San Francisco Bay Area, raised in a family whose roots trace back to Shanghai and whose members immigrated to the United States in the 1950s. He discovered his passion for martial arts at age seven after his grandfather took him to watch the Shaolin Temple film starring Jet Li, and began learning Chinese martial arts at age eleven, inspired by legends such as Jackie Chan, Jet Li and Bruce Lee. He attended Head-Royce School, a prestigious private school in California, then enrolled at the University of Oregon to study architecture, where he founded the university's Chinese Martial Arts Society and became its first coach. He also traveled to Beijing in 1994 to train with the Chinese martial arts team, where he met his senior fellow Wu Jing. After graduation, he briefly worked at an architecture firm but quit and traveled to Asia to witness Hong Kong's handover. He began working as a model in Hong Kong after running out of money, and was discovered by director Yim Ho who offered him a film role that became a turning point in his life. He achieved widespread fame by winning the Best Supporting Actor award at the 2004 Taiwan Golden Horse Awards for the film New Police Story. In 2005 he formed the group Alive with three colleagues and released the song Adam's Choice, and won the Best New Director award at the 2007 Hong Kong Film Awards for The Heavenly Kings. In 2012 he co-founded a film production company with his friend Stephen Fung, and also co-opened a sushi restaurant named Monster Sushi. In 2015 he starred in the AMC series Into the Badlands alongside serving as executive producer with Stephen Fung. On a personal note, he married his girlfriend of eight years, Lisa Selesner, in 2010, and they had a daughter named Raven in 2013; his mother Diana passed away after an illness in 2014.