Evelyn Quan Wang

This article is about the fictional character. For the mechanical engineer, see Evelyn Wang.

Evelyn Quan Wang is a fictional character and the protagonist of the 2022 absurdist comedy-drama film Everything Everywhere All at Once. Portrayed by Michelle Yeoh and created by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert^[a], Evelyn is a Chinese-American immigrant and laundromat owner who, while being audited by the IRS, discovers that she must connect with parallel universe versions of herself to prevent an omnicidal nihilist version of her daughter from another dimension from destroying her universe, and the multiverse beyond it. Yeoh also plays numerous alternate-dimension versions of Evelyn.

Evelyn Quan Wang
Everything Everywhere All at Once character
Michelle Yeoh as Evelyn Quan Wang
First appearance	Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)
Created by	Daniel Kwan Daniel Scheinert
Portrayed by	Michelle Yeoh
In-universe information
Full name	Evelyn Quan Wang
Species	Verse-jumped human
Gender	Female
Occupation	Laundromat owner
Family	Gong Gong (father)
Spouse	Waymond Wang (husband)
Significant others	Deirdre Beaubeirdre (Hot Dog Dimension)
Children	Joy Wang (daughter) Jobu Tupaki (daughter; Dimension Alpha)

The filmmakers initially sought Jackie Chan for the role of Evelyn before the script was revised to feature a female protagonist,^[1] inspired by the works of Hong Kong film director Wong Kar-wai, the children's book Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, and the video game Everything. Yeoh garnered widespread critical acclaim for her performance, winning the Best Actress at the 95th Academy Awards.^[2][3][4][5]

Development

The character that would become Evelyn Quan Wang was originally written to be portrayed by Jackie Chan, until Kwan and Scheinert reconceived the character as a woman, feeling it would make the husband–wife dynamic in the story more relatable,^[6] naming the character Michelle Wang, after their favorite to cast in the role, Michelle Yeoh, who said, "If you ask the Daniels, when they started on this draft, they focused on, 'Well, we are doing this for Michelle Yeoh.'"^[7] The character's first name was eventually changed to Evelyn. With her resemblance to the version of Evelyn as a martial artist and film star,^[8] Yeoh opposed naming the character Michelle. "Evelyn deserves her own story to be told. This is a very ordinary mother [and] housewife who is trying her best to be a good mother to her daughter, a good daughter to her father, a wife that's trying to keep the family together [...] I don't like to integrate me, Michelle Yeoh, into the characters that I play, because they all deserve their own journey and their stories to be told".^[8]

It was announced in August 2018 that Yeoh had been cast to star in what was described as an "interdimensional action film" from Kwan and Scheinert, with Anthony and Joe Russo attached to produce.^[9]

Fictional character biography

Evelyn Quan Wang was born in China. In the main universe, as a young woman, she elopes with her husband Waymond Wang to the United States against the wishes of her father who threatens to disown her.

Once in California, she finds herself disappointed with their living conditions and with the drudgery of running a laundromat. She finds joy when their daughter Joy is born, but later struggles with her as a rebellious teenager.

One of Evelyn's unfulfilled ambitions in life was to become a professional singer. The story suggests that she tried and failed at writing a novel, becoming a chef, teaching, becoming a singing coach, and in becoming a masseuse.

Character storyline

Main article: Everything Everywhere All at Once

 

Michelle Yeoh portrays Evelyn.

In the present day, Evelyn Wang is stressed out as she tries to sort piles of receipts, as the laundromat is being audited by the IRS. Her husband Waymond tries to serve Evelyn divorce papers in an attempt to get her attention so they can talk about their marriage. She is also concerned about preparing for a Chinese New Year party at the laundromat that evening, which her demanding father (Gong Gong) will be attending. When their adult daughter Joy arrives to help them, along with her non-Chinese girlfriend Becky, Evelyn says that she accepts their gay, mixed-race relationship, but implies that her own father would not approve, and avoids Joy's pleas to discuss whether or not Becky is welcome at the party.^[10] Unable to have a meaningful conversation with her mother, Joy leaves the laundromat in tears with Becky, and Evelyn is left subdued.

In the elevator at the regional IRS office, Evelyn has her first encounter with Alpha-Waymond, a version of Waymond from the "Alphaverse", and sees a flashback of her own life. She is distracted and unable to focus during a meeting with IRS inspector Deirdre Beaubeirdre, who questions why they have claimed a karaoke machine as a business expense, and scolds her for not taking the meeting seriously and for not bringing their daughter to help translate as promised. Meanwhile, Evelyn is having discussions in parallel in a janitor's closet with Alpha-Waymond, who tells her that every disappointment and failure she has experienced in life has made her uniquely qualified to save every world in the infinite multiverse from catastrophe. Deirdre gives the family an extension until 6 pm that evening, but Evelyn – confused by Waymond's sudden mention of divorce and berated by her father for never completing anything – punches Deirdre, landing them in trouble with security.

Alpha-Waymond reappears to help Evelyn out of this difficult situation. She learns, as they dodge security officers and more monstrous versions of Deirdre together, that many parallel universes exist because every life choice creates a new alternative universe. In the Alphaverse, the brilliant late Alpha-Evelyn developed "verse-jumping" technology, which enables people to access the physical skills, knowledge, and memories of their parallel selves by performing bizarre actions that are statistically unlikely. As chaos ensues around them, Evelyn herself experiences verse-jumping, briefly discovering other versions of herself including the glamorous kung fu film star that she could have been if she had refused to marry Waymond all those years ago.

All universes are now under threat of complete annihilation due to the all-powerful Jobu Tupaki, whose mind was splintered due to excessive pressure from Alpha-Evelyn; she can verse-jump and manipulate matter at will. When Evelyn has her first direct encounter with Jobu Tupaki, who is dressed like Elvis and coldly and disrespectfully destroys two police officers, it finally hits home with her that Jobu is simply another version of Joy, who is extremely unhappy. Evelyn and Jobu, dressed in a tennis outfit, face off in a tense one-on-one conversation. Evelyn blames Jobu for all of Joy's "failures", while Jobu starts to entice Evelyn with the empty nihilism of the Everything Bagel she has built, which has eased her pain with the realization that "nothing matters". As the force of the bagel starts to destabilize the multiverse, Alpha-Gong Gong appears in an electronic wheelchair to temporarily crush Jobu.

Alpha-Gong Gong instructs Evelyn to kill Joy to stop Jobu from using her to enter Evelyn's universe. Evelyn refuses and decides to face Jobu by gaining equivalent powers through repeated verse-jumping. Alpha-Gong Gong, convinced that Evelyn's mind has been compromised like Jobu's, sends soldiers after Evelyn. While they fight, Jobu locates and kills Alpha-Waymond in the Alphaverse. As Jobu confronts Evelyn in her universe, Evelyn's mind splinters, and she collapses.

Evelyn uncontrollably verse-jumps alongside Jobu across bizarre and diverse universes. Jobu reveals she does not want to fight at all, but that instead, she has been searching for an Evelyn who can see, as she does, that nothing matters. She brings Evelyn to the Everything Bagel, explaining that she wants to use it to allow herself and Evelyn to truly die. Upon looking into the Bagel, Evelyn is initially persuaded, and behaves cruelly and nihilistically in her other universes, hurting those around her.

Just as Evelyn enters the Bagel with Jobu, she pauses to listen to Waymond's pleas for everybody to stop fighting and to instead be kind, even when life does not make sense. Evelyn has an existentialist epiphany and decides to follow Waymond's absurdist^[11] and humanist^[12] advice, using her multiverse powers to fight with empathy^[13] and bring happiness to those around her; in doing so, she repairs her damage in the other universes and neutralizes Alpha-Gong Gong's fighters. In the universe where humans evolved to have hot dogs for fingers, Evelyn reconciles with her partner Deirdre;

In her home universe, Evelyn reconciles with Waymond, accepts Joy and Becky's relationship–and tells Gong Gong of it–while Waymond convinces Deirdre to let them redo their taxes. Jobu decides to enter the Bagel alone while, simultaneously in Evelyn's universe, Joy begs Evelyn to let her go. Evelyn tells Joy that even when nothing makes sense and even though she could be anywhere else in the multiverse, she will always want to be with Joy. Evelyn and the others save Jobu from the Bagel, and Evelyn and Joy embrace.

Sometime later, with the family's relationships improved, they return to the IRS building to refile their taxes. As Deirdre talks, Evelyn's attention is momentarily drawn to her alternative selves, before she grounds herself back in her home universe.

Other versions

This section explores the alternate dimension versions of Evelyn featured throughout Everything Everywhere All at Once.

Alpha-Evelyn

Evelyn Tupaki, informally known as Alpha-Evelyn, is the mother of Jobu Tupaki and the inventor of multiversal travel, whose actions lead to her daughter becoming one with all other versions of herself, and becoming an omnicidal nihilist who seeks to destroy the multiverse.

Hot Dog Evelyn

In the Hot Dog Dimension, where humans evolved to have hot dog fingers and use their feet more often, its Evelyn is married to Deirdre Beaubeirdre.^[14]

Actress Evelyn

As part of the film's metatextuality with the "real world" of the viewer,^[15][16] one of the alternate versions of Evelyn—a famous martial arts movie star—is a portrayal of Yeoh herself, with footage of her from the red carpet of Crazy Rich Asians and other films being used to represent the character.^[16][17][18]

Miscellaneous

Further alternate versions of Evelyn appear throughout the film, including a Chef Evelyn whose coworker is living through a raccoon-focused version of the film Ratatouille, and numerous random Evelyns who Jobu Tupaki kills in her pursuit of Evelyn, as well as others Evelyn inhabits, including a Rock Evelyn.^[14]

Reception

Most reviewers called Michelle Yeoh's performance as Evelyn as the best of her career,^[19][20][21] Rotten Tomatoes calling her "outstanding",^[22] and David Ehrlich of IndieWire calling it the "greatest performance [she] has ever given".^[23] Marya E. Gates of RogerEbert.com also called Yeoh "the anchor of the film, given a role that showcases her wide range of talents, from her fine martial art skills to her superb comic timing to her ability to excavate endless depths of rich human emotion, often just from a glance or a reaction."^[24] Maureen Ryan of Vanity Fair highlighted how "Yeoh imbues Evelyn with moving shades of melancholy, regret, resolve, and growing curiosity" and adding that she "makes her embrace of lead-character energy positively gripping."^[25] Adam Nayman of The Ringer called the film "a love letter to Yeoh [and] extremely poignant, giving its 59-year-old star a chance to flex unexpected acting muscles while revisiting the high-flying fight choreography that made her a global icon back in the 1990s".^[26] Tasha Robinson of Polygon named the scene of Evelyn and Joy Wang as rocks with their dialogue appearing as on-screen subtitles, all while trying to find common ground, as one of the best movie scenes of 2022, saying "...it's a perfect moment. Like so many EEAAO sequences, it turns between emotions on a dime. But the quiet of the moment is essential. Out of context, it's just an odd moment between rocks. But within the context of the film, it's a breather the audience and characters both desperately need, and the emotions are so heightened that just the sight of rock-Joy and rock-Evelyn sharing a companionable laugh is remarkably heartening and hilarious",^[27] Armond White of National Review writing of the same sequence how "Yeoh brings adult stability to the blackout-skit chaos and cast of "stupid human" clowns",^[28] and Robert Lee III of Collider complimenting her "surprisingly effective emotional core".^[29] The A.V. Club included Evelyn Wang on its list of the "15 Best Movie Moms Of All Time," with Cindy White writing that the character's "...love for her daughter crosses universes and spans realities. It's so strong, you can feel it coming through the screen, even when the two of them are rocks."^[30]

Accolades

At the 95th Academy Awards, Michelle Yeoh won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance as Evelyn Wang,^[31][32] making her the first Asian Best Actress, the second woman of color Best Actress, and the first Malaysian to win any Academy Award.^[33] She also won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Comedy or Musical at the 80th Golden Globe Awards.^[34]

See also

• Asian Americans in arts and entertainment

Notes

1. Known collectively as The Daniels

References

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2. "The Cult of Daniels". February 28, 2023.
3. Guy, Zoe (March 13, 2023). "Everything Everywhere All at Once Did It For the Mommies". Vulture. from the original on March 13, 2023. Retrieved 2023-03-13.
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