In the new movie Everything Everywhere All at Once from directing duo The Daniels (that’s Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert), laundromat owner Evelyn Wang is bad at everything.

Her business is failing, her relationships with her husband and daughter are falling apart. As actress Michelle Yeoh puts it, Evelyn is “a jack-of-not-even-all-trades. She’s a jack of nothing and master of nothing.”

As if that weren’t enough, she’s also being audited by the IRS.

“It’s probably easier to say what is going right in her life, the minute that you meet Evelyn Wang,” Yeoh says.

She is not a stereotypical superhero — and that’s exactly what makes Evelyn so compelling for Yeoh.

“I felt that this was such a perfect opportunity to give a voice to the very ordinary mothers and housewife who are out there, you know, doing the most mundane things and get so taken for granted,” Yeoh says. “And then let her discover that, oh my God, she is a superhero.”

Yeoh says finding the value in the ordinary — and the bizarre — is a superpower in itself.

“Whether you have hot dog fingers, whether you’re a rock, what you have evolved to. I think the core spirit, the core emotion is very, very real in whatever universe you are in,” Yeoh says.

In our universe, Yeoh has had her own string of different life paths. She was a ballerina and a pageant queen before an injury led her to become the leading lady of Hong Kong’s action movies in the 1990s.

Now, 30 years later, Yeoh is finally getting her turn at a leading role in a Hollywood movie.