Kung Fu's Shannon Dang Teases Her Dance Skills In Action During Season 2 - Exclusive
With a title like "Kung Fu," it's no surprise that The CW show includes plenty of martial arts action. After spending three years training in a Shaolin monastery in China, main character Nicky Shen (Olivia Liang) returned home to San Francisco as a kung fu expert. This skill has proven incredibly useful to her mission of safeguarding the world from nefarious forces she only learned about after her mentor was killed. Through Nicky, the show has introduced several other characters with exceptional kung fu abilities — most recently, a cousin named Mia (Vanessa Yao), whom Nicky and her family previously knew nothing about.
Yet for all the martial arts performed in each episode of the show, the members of Nicky's family have largely stayed on the sidelines due to their lack of fighting skills. Of course, they've all found other ways to help. In particular, Nicky's older sister, Althea, played by Shannon Dang, proves to be an invaluable ally due to her impressive skills with a computer. But we've never seen her spring into martial arts action — at least, not yet. In an exclusive interview with Looper, Dang discussed her background in dance and teased the possibility of using that talent in either a fight or a dance sequence in the currently airing second season of "Kung Fu."
The show may require the skills she learned from dance
Shannon Dang started her performing career as a dancer and moved into acting afterward. Given all the dance experience she has under her belt, she admitted it seems only natural that she would use those skills to perform stunts in "Kung Fu." "I've been dancing almost my whole life," Dang shared. "I did three seasons dancing for the LA Clippers, three seasons dancing for the Los Angeles Rams, and it's funny because the year I retired, right after is when I booked 'Kung Fu.' People always ask, 'Oh, so are you using your dance skills for the kung fu?' Ironically, Althea has not been able to fight yet."
While Althea hasn't demonstrated her martial arts prowess on the show so far, Dang revealed her always fashionable character may get into fighting shape very soon — and before that, she might even get her own dance solo. "It's not too far away in the future where she will have her time [to fight]," Dang teased, "and if she does fight, definitely she'll be dressed in something fantastic. Who knows if she will have a dance moment before her kung fu moment? I'd be very excited to see."
The second season of "Kung Fu" airs on The CW on Wednesdays at 9:00 p.m. ET. New episodes are available on the CW website and app the following day.