"The Rock will be very upset,” the Hollywood producer said. He was referring, of course, to WWF star Dwayne Johnson, who has recently been making the transition to a film career. The producer in question was distraught because he had just been told that Chow Yun-Fat, one of the most respected actors in Asia and a rising star in the U.S., was turning down the golden opportunity of playing the villain in The Scorpion King—the prequel to this summer’s The Mummy Returns—opposite the Rock.

“Of course I turned it down,” says Chow’s manager, Terence Chang. “When we were first trying to get American roles for Chow in the early ’90s, before Jet Li had come over, he was offered a lot of bad-guy parts. He was asked to play the villain in The Shadow, to support Alec Baldwin, and I turned it down. Recently, Chow was getting a lot of heat because of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. He was approached by Universal to play the villain in The Scorpion King, to support the Rock—who is not yet an actor.”

Early on, Chang had to fight for heroic roles for Chow. “What [the producers] don’t understand is that the movie audience is much more conservative in Asia. They regard Jackie Chan and Chow Yun-fat as icons. If one of them plays a real villain, his career in Asia will be over.”

With the success of Ang Lee’s pan-Asian Crouching Tiger, the cult around martial arts master Yuen Wo-ping, and Lucy Liu’s popularity, it might be tempting to assume that the bad old days of Asian actors’ being treated as second-class citizens are gone. Asian actors with only a few films under their belt are being snapped up by the studios. For example, Zhang Ziyi, the 22-year-old sword-fighting ingenue of Crouching Tiger, is costarring with Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker in Rush Hour 2. The situation for Asians in Hollywood has reached critical mass, according to Asian-American producer Chris Lee (Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within), “in terms of the range and variety of the material that is out there.”

But consider the case of Crouching Tiger’s other female lead, action star Michelle Yeoh, who has traded punches with Jackie Chan and Jet Li in her Hong Kong hits. Yeoh earned $1 million for her crowd-pleasing turn as a Chinese secret agent in the 1997 James Bond installment Tomorrow Never Dies, but follow-up roles were scarce. One project that got away was the techno-thriller The Matrix. Yeoh read for the female lead in that film, but the part went to Carrie-Anne Moss, a Caucasian with virtually no martial arts experience. So it’s not all that difficult to understand why Yeoh decided to pass on a supporting role in the two Matrix sequels.

Yeoh also had positive reasons for opting out of the Matrix sequels: Those films were scheduled for an 11-month back-to-back shoot in Australia, and she wanted to continue working on The Touch, a personal project that will film this year in China. “I believe it’s time to do other things, stories coming from Asia,” Yeoh told one reporter. “At the end of the day, you have to do what’s really important to you.”

Like Yeoh, Jet Li fits into a category Hollywood can understand: martial arts star. And Li, who can open a movie on his own, seems to know this. He was the first choice for the role that raised Chow’s profile this year, the noble warrior Li Mu-bai in Crouching Tiger. But he ditched the project in favor of the star vehicle Romeo Must Die for producer Joel Silver. A year later, it was Silver’s turn to be abandoned, as Li spurned a reported $3 million offer to appear in the producer’s Matrix sequels in favor of top billing in the parallel-worlds thriller One at Columbia Pictures. Li’s onetime interest in the role of Kato, in a film based on The Green Hornet, suggests that he has a fixed image of the kind of star he wants to become.