Based on a concept and treatment by the legendary Bruce Lee, Warrior is a martial arts action show that is still kicking strong into season 3. Set in 1870s San Francisco, it follows the story of Ah Sahm (Andrew Koji) who arrives in America from China and finds himself pulled into the Tong Wars and the racial tension at the time.
Fortress of Solitude had the opportunity to speak to the show’s creator Jonathan Tropper about Warrior Season 3. Tropper discussed more about the delay between the second and third seasons of the show, and the challenges it created to the crew. In addition, he revealed more about the decision to continue filming in South Africa as well as how Season 3 honours the legacy of Lee 50 years after his passing.
Please note: This interview took place before the SAG-AFTRA strike. It has also been edited for clarity.
Congratulations on Season 3 of Warrior. My first question is what keeps drawing the Warrior team back to South Africa as a place to film?
Jonathan Tropper: Well, originally, we went there, we scouted a handful of locations, and we needed to build a massive backlot to serve as our Chinatown. So, we needed a place that had the real estate, had the infrastructure, and where the cost of construction wasn’t going to blow us out of the water. When we went to Cape Town, it became really clear that all the skill sets were there. And the cost compared to building in the United States was just … You couldn’t compare them in terms of the cost of construction. So, we set up shop there.
Having done two seasons, there was never a question that’s where we would go back, because a big chunk of our backlot was still standing. And we had a lot of our production team down there. Even in the two and a half years we were not in production, so many more productions came to Cape Town that the skill levels have only gotten better. That’s sort of the home of the show, so we didn’t even discuss going somewhere else.
There’s certainly a parallel in how the show addresses the racism of San Francisco in the 1870s, while South Africa has also got its own history of oppression. So, it feels like this is one of the right places to tell this kind of story.
I think, thematically, most countries have to have a reckoning with their history of racism, but certainly, it’s very raw in South Africa. [Warrior is] a show that deals with a different time, but a form of systemic racism that’s different than the one in South Africa, but still, obviously, there are a lot of parallels and a lot of similarities. Yeah, sometimes when we were using certain locations in the heart of Cape Town, and some of the government buildings or whatever, you could certainly feel that we were shooting in a place that has its own troubled history. And that added a layer of inevitability to us shooting there, for sure.
You mentioned there was the massive delay between the second and third season of the of the show – for several reasons, including a pandemic. Do you feel that time away was a valuable pause for the show, or was it at the point that you just wanted to get right back into it?
There was really only one reason for that. I mean, yeah, the pandemic would have slowed us down. But the reason for the delay was that our home network Cinemax went out of business, because of an acquisition when HBO and Warner Bros. were bought. They were bought by AT&T and Cinemax was put out of business, and that put us out of business. And then they were bought again by Discovery, after we had gotten back into business with HBO Max. So, we’ve been affected by a lot of mergers.
But no, I don’t think anyone felt it was valuable. I think we would have liked to have done our third season in sequence a year later. There were a lot of challenges to coming back after two and a half years. We had to rebuild all our sets. We had to rebuild all our wardrobe … All the stuff that should have been sitting there. We lost some of our stages at Cape Town Studios, and we had to find other stages. All the things that would have made it easy to come back were gone. And it was like building a new show but building a new show that had to really match the old show. So that was a big challenge. While I think we rose to it admirably, I think we all would have preferred to just come back a year later like we should have.
2023 also marks the 50-year anniversary since the passing of Bruce Lee. Did you feel that there was any sort of additional pressure to make Warrior Season 3 that more special considering the significance of the event?
I think we felt that pressure not because of the year it was but simply because it had been such a battle to come back that the idea that we would have battled all those odds to come back and not do an amazing or incredible season would have just been so disappointing. So I think we felt pressure from the minute we got into the writers’ room to make sure our storylines, our characters … That everything really measured up to the first two seasons and a little bit beyond.
Then because of the anniversary of Bruce Lee and because of the fact that Shannon [Lee] is one of our producers, we did want to make sure that we did in some way in the show address the legacy of Bruce Lee, which we have done [in an episode].
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Watch Warrior Season 3 on Showmax.
