For a woman who spends most of her time on-screen suffering, Michelle Yeoh is remarkably cheerful. In person, she is tiny. Her powerful body, which flew across the sky in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and crashed a motorcycle while handcuffed to Pierce Brosnan in Tomorrow Never Dies, is wiry and delicate. Only her slightly mincing gait reveals how much her body has been capable of; she walks carefully, with a permanent turnout, like a retired ballet instructor.

In fact, Yeoh came to martial-arts performance through dance. After winning the Miss Malaysia crown in 1983, Yeoh moved to Hong Kong to start making movies.“My first movie with Sammo Hung, the guys were doing all the action and the girls were the damsels in distress,” she told me recently. Yeoh, who was an athletic dancer while growing up in Malaysia, saw the fighting and thought to herself, “This is like choreography.”

At the Four Seasons in Manhattan, Yeoh is drinking coffee and promoting Crazy Rich Asians—a film she carries, even though her only action scene is around a mahjong table. (It’s a tense scene, but it’s no jumping off a skyscraper while attached to James Bond.) Yeoh likes mahjong, and she plays it for fun. “When you play it, you have a flair—how you move, how you use your hands,” she said. Sometimes she and her friends go crazy: they wear all their rings as they shuffle the tiles, to amplify the clacking.

It’s been over 20 years since Yeoh’s turn as a Bond girl, and yet it’s only now—with the attention around Crazy Rich Asians, and a TV role as a powerful Starfleet captain on Star Trek: Discovery—that Yeoh is basking in the American spotlight. On Monday, CBS confirmed that Yeoh will star in her own Star Trek spin-off, reprising her role as Philippa Georgiou. In the official release, Yeoh is quoted: “I can’t wait to see where it all goes—certainly I believe it will go ‘where no WOMAN has ever gone before!’” The former pageant queen has a regal bearing and a quick laugh, burbling with amusement when she describes the slapdash filmmaking methods common in Hong Kong cinema when she was first starting out. It’s quite a contrast to the characters she has typically played: stoic action stars, or grave, long-suffering women. It’s as if the lens of pain is the only way she can be seen or understood on-screen, as if her implacable endurance redeems the damage done to her characters. Yeoh’s performances lend depth to women who are repressed by duty, and she’s so good that when watching her, it’s possible to forget what has caused the pain in the first place.

The night before we spoke, director Ang Lee introduced a special screening of Crazy Rich Asians at the Museum of the Moving Image by reminiscing with Yeoh about the filming of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon—the Oscar-winning global hit that cemented his career. While filming stunts, Yeoh tore her anterior cruciate ligament, one of the major ligaments that stabilizes the knee joint. Yeoh took two months to recover; when she returned to set, she could only do stationary scenes. The first she shot upon her return was the most important one in the movie: its finalé, where Yeoh’s character, Yu Shu Lien, cradles the man she loves, played by Chow Yun-Fat, as he dies in her arms.

In Lee’s telling, the production, by that point, felt fraught. Yeoh’s injury had forced rescheduling, and Cantonese speakers Yeoh and Chow struggled with the Mandarin dialogue. Lee hid it from his actors, but he was having doubts about the future of his movie, no matter how visionary it seemed in his mind. To add insult to injury, when Yeoh was seated in the shot, her immobilized, healing knee had to be propped up on a stool at a wild angle. Lee had to shoot it close-up to preserve the illusion. They did four takes that day; Lee knew he got the performance he wanted from Yeoh on the third. “I had to go away and cry for 15 minutes,” Lee said. “I could feel the pain she was carrying.” (Onstage, Yeoh deflected this seriousness with a charming little quip—and for a moment, she was fully the former Miss Malaysia, poised and with a slight diva drawl: “Good thing I was flexible.”)