Jason Scott Lee has never chased easy roles. Not when he embodied Bruce Lee in Dragon, not when he voiced David in Lilo & Stitch, and certainly not when he signed on for The Wind and the Reckoning, a historical indie about resistance and disease in 1800s Hawaii—filmed during a modern-day pandemic. “It’s the little film that could,” Lee says, laughing. “No money. Sixteen days. COVID lockdowns. But somehow… it breathes.”
Breathing is no small feat when you’re tackling the first Hawaiian-language film to receive international distribution—one that digs into the U.S. overthrow of Hawaii’s monarchy. “I think people don’t realize that Hawaii was once an independent nation,” Lee says. “There’s a lot of history that hasn’t been told.” He’s not wrong. Most viewers only know Hawaii through honeymoon brochures and Lilo’s ukulele. This film pushes deeper, telling the true story of a man who defied the U.S. government’s forced leprosy exile order.
“The producers were shocked,” he recalls of an early L.A. screening. “Nobody wanted to pick it up. They said, ‘How many Hawaiian speakers are there? Three thousand?’” The implied math was clear: not marketable. But that didn’t stop the filmmakers. Nor did it stop Lee from anchoring the film with a slow-burning, haunted performance. “You’re not looking at people who chatter a lot,” he says. “It’s quiet. Sedentary. But the gravitas—it has to be there. This is life and death.”
That gravitas extends beyond the screen. Lee, who spent years living in Singapore and Southern California, returned to his Big Island homestead during the pandemic. “I looked at my wife and said, we have no resources here. Back home we’ve got rainwater, wild pigs, gardens… it was time.” Sustainability, not just as a lifestyle, but a mindset.
And yet, in case you thought he only thrived in dramas, Lee’s other recent gig finds him back on Disney+ as the laid-back dad on Doogie Kameāloha, M.D. “That’s a whole different style,” he says. “You raise the intonation, keep the tempo up. It’s more animated. More anxiety in a way.” He even got a crash course in beatboxing. “They told me, ‘Just say boots and cats.’ I was like, what the hell is boots and cats?”
His range is wild: Hawaiian rebels, sitcom dads, animated surfers, and of course, Bruce Lee. “That role wasn’t an impression,” he clarifies. “At first, the training didn’t sit right with me. Then I met one of Bruce’s students who really showed me his art, his philosophy. That changed everything. Once I understood the holistic idea—speed is power, strengthen your fingers, don’t telegraph—I could fly.”
He hasn’t stopped flying. Next up is a cameo in Disney’s live-action Lilo & Stitch, revisiting his old character David… this time as a luau manager. “I said, give me anything. I just want to be part of it.”
But even with all these threads—Disney, Doogie, dragons—it’s The Wind and the Reckoning that feels closest to the bone. “When I was younger, I was raised in a Cantonese household,” he says. “Hawaiian culture was around me, but I didn’t grow up immersed in it. Doing this film, speaking the language—that was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. But it was also from the heart.”
That heart, that reverence for heritage and truth, has been the throughline of Lee’s career—even when Hollywood wasn’t always ready for it. “I’ve done a lot of films to explore culture. Rapa Nui was about my Polynesian roots. Jungle Book was about harmony with nature. Doogie lets me drop in pearls of Hawaiian wisdom, even a bit of pidgin. It’s all part of it.”
He may have played the dragon once, but these days, Jason Scott Lee seems more interested in being the wind—quiet but forceful, always moving forward, and refusing to be boxed in by what Hollywood expects.
Watch the interview above and then check out the video below.
