Tony Leung talks about plants having souls and ‘last stage of his career’ in Singapore

SINGAPORE – Actor Tony Leung Chiu Wai has a new respect for plants. Since playing a neuroscientist who becomes fixated on researching the secret thoughts of an old ginkgo tree in his latest film, Silent Friend (2025), the Hong Kong star has become convinced of leafy intelligence.

For one thing, his morning jogs through the hills are no longer solitary. He says: “It’s very strange, when I run now, it feels like the trees are not just living beings but sentient beings. It’s like they’re watching me and I have a lot of company.”

The osmanthus and jasmine flowers he keeps at home have also assumed a tragic aspect, he adds, citing Silent Friend co-star Lea Seydoux’s botanist character, Alice Sauvage, on the loneliness of garden plants, separated from their peers in the wild.

Leung, 63, is speaking to a group of local media from a Marina Bay Sands hotel suite on Nov 29, hours before the local premiere of Silent Friend at the 36th Singapore International Film Festival.

The gander through three characters’ deepening relationship with plants over more than a century on a German university campus is his first European production, and his most experimental.

Camera angles flip from frame to frame, the protagonist is a tree, and among the many psychedelic sketches of “brain waves” is one that seemingly captures said tree’s sexual climax.

The film levelled Leung’s hierarchy of life forms. He says in Mandarin: “If you have this awareness of plants, then insects and other animals will also be included. You will realise that you’re not at the top of the tree, with everyone else below you being stupid or without much thought. You’ll think that we are all equal.”

While building a new house by the lake recently, he was also careful to avoid any needless killing of trees.

His next role as a serial killer will be the complete opposite. When Leung revealed this the night before at a ticketed dialogue session, In Conversation With Tony Leung, held at Marina Bay Sands, the crowd gasped and cheered. But at the media roundtable, he teases no more details of this murderous turn.

Then again, it might not be a total gear shift for Leung. A killer is, by definition, an outsider – a condition his most beloved characters share, including such lonely souls as the sensitive lover of Wong Kar Wai’s In The Mood For Love (2000) and Happy Together (1997), and the sad cop of Infernal Affairs (2002) and Chungking Express (1994).

Silent Friend’s Hungarian director Ildiko Enyedi also draws parallels between Leung’s scientist character and the central ginkgo tree, which she calls “the ideal stranger” to its environment.

Unlike most plants, the ginkgo is a non-flowering plant, she says at the roundtable with Leung. “Somehow a scientist is also someone outside of a system.”

Enyedi, who directed Oscar-nominated Of Body And Soul (2017), wrote the part of neuroscientist Tony Wong for Leung, after watching clips of his past interviews. She says: “I had the strong feeling that there is something which is very much him, him as a person, that he doesn’t show in films, and I was curious about that person.”

The scientist she had in mind was unguarded and without pretence, which is why she needed not just a brilliant actor, but a “very truthful person who has wise and tender eyes to the world”, she adds.

He spent six months getting in character for Silent Friend, hiring an English coach to give him a trace of a British accent as Leung imagined the fictional character had studied in Cambridge. He also visited neuroscientists and studied books on plant consciousness and his character’s field of early cognitive development.

By the end, he believed he was that person, he says.

His comfortable aloneness is no contrivance too. Says Leung: “I enjoy being alone very much.”

He loves going to cities where he does not speak the language, a la the film Lost in Translation (2004), he adds. Though he shares the natural melancholy of that film’s lead actor Bill Murray – who is an awkward and uncomprehending American in Tokyo – Leung is quite happy being a fish out of water.

He is nostalgic about filming Europe Raider (2018) in the south of Italy during the deserted off-peak season, saying of the time: “I lived on top of a hill, where there were only three restaurants, so I would ride my bike to the beach every day and do stretching there or meditate.

“I would ride on my bike everywhere and go to those restaurants to have lunch by myself, go back home to practise some mountain bike techniques, read a book or just sit outside my house.

“I didn’t feel lonely.”

The actor is an obvious introvert. In person, his famous gaze, which hints at inner worlds of hurt, is frequently averted, though no less potent when he turns it upon whoever he is speaking to.

It stays steady even when the talk turns to retirement. He says: “You could say I’m in the last stage of my acting career. It’s been 40 years. At most, I have 20 years more, or I don’t know, I might only have 10.

“In this last stage, I hope to return to TV, where I got my start.” If a drama series were to be his coda, it would be a full-circle moment, he adds.

But he has no designs on directing. Leung says: “When you’ve worked with Hou Hsiao-hsien, Lee Ang, Ildiko and company, these great directors, you will realise that you will never be able to shoot a movie like that.

“So, I’ve never thought of directing and I think I don’t have the talent or anything to say as a film-maker.”

Besides, he is not yet sick of acting, which he said at the dialogue on Nov 28 is still his way of expressing feelings. “I am a very shy person who used to keep everything inside,” he adds. But acting, “like mental therapy”, lifted the lid on that.

“(When I’m acting) people don’t know that it’s me. They think I’m playing a character but actually, the feelings and emotion are from me,” he adds.

At the dialogue, when asked the same question about trying his hand at directing, Leung said: “I’ll just stay true to my role as an actor and do well in interpreting what directors wish to express in their films.”

The flip side is that those looking to employ Leung’s eyes will have to interest him as directors. “I always feel like the script is not the most important thing,” he says.

“It is the director as a person. No matter how good a script is, it could be put in the wrong hands.”

As for future plans, he never makes them. Flashing a grin, he says: “I don’t know what will happen next. I just let things happen.”