Michelle Yeoh Trained With Real Surgeons for Her Return to Action Filmmaking

In the weeks before a premiere at a fall film festival, most directors are racing the clock to finish a final edit or praying to their respective higher powers. In the run-up to the Toronto Film Festival, however, Roshan Sethi — the filmmaker behind The Surgeon, one of TIFF’s hottest sales titles starring Michelle Yeoh — was in the hospital.

Don’t worry. Sethi is in good health. For roughly two months of every year, Sethi is on call at Boston’s Mass General Brigham. In addition to co-creating the Fox medical series The Resident and directing three feature films, he is a practicing radiation oncologist. (When talking over a mid-August evening about his new movie, Sethi had to pause mid-interview to take a call from the hospital, a first for this reporter.) “I decided to do it in the weeks before TIFF because it just felt to me like there wasn’t that much going on,” says Sethi, differentiating himself from pretty much every other independent filmmaker on the planet.

It was only a year earlier, at the top of 2025, when Sethi was writing The Surgeon in the hours before starting his 8 a.m. shift at the hospital. While he would often spend his off hours writing during his residency, the filmmaker no longer does his creative work during the weeks when he is back in the medical field. “I’m too old for that now,” he says with a laugh. But he was taken with the idea of an action film set around a highly skilled surgeon and finished the screenplay in only 10 days.

The film follows a newly retired surgeon who, while struggling to adjust to her life outside the operating room, is kidnapped and forced to perform surgery on a mystery patient, and must use her medical knowledge to find a way to escape.

Without spoiling the more stomach-churning moments that will surely delight a packed house at the Royal Alexandra Theatre at the film’s Sept. 12 premiere, scalpels and clamps are used in lieu of fists and guns, and tendons, pelvises, lungs, intestinal tracts and nasal cavities are on full display. “I’m terrified of boring anybody, ever,“ admits Sethi.

In contrast to the carnage in The Surgeon, Sethi’s other features, including the Duplass brothers-produced 7 Days and the Jonathan Groff starrer A Nice Indian Boy, were all bighearted comedies. But his personal viewing habits skew towards thrillers and action films, and a longtime hero is Michael Crichton, the Harvard Medical School graduate turned writer who parlayed his science background into franchises like Jurassic Park and ER.

So, with little experience in genre filmmaking, Sethi decided to write a screenplay that would play to his strengths, which, in this case, meant tapping in to an understanding of gross (really gross) anatomy that is well above your average DGA member.

Luckily, after the box office success of Crazy Rich Asians, a best actress Oscar for Everything Everywhere All at Once and the Wicked films, Yeoh was in the market for a “different kind of action film,” she says, “that’s fun, not kick-ass, but still badass.” Easier said than done. “I’ve done my fair share of very physical fighting — [movies] where I am either a spy or detective or someone who is very skilled in martial arts,” says Yeoh of a career that has included the likes of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and the James Bond entry Tomorrow Never Dies.

Yeoh had long been talking to Basil Iwanyk, the producer behind the John Wick franchise, about working together. After reading a middle-of-the-road action script, she recalls expressing her frustration to Iwanyk: “I said to him, ‘Come on, Basil. You’ve done this! I’ve done this!'”

Shortly after, Sethi’s The Surgeon landed at Thunder Road and, eventually, with Yeoh. “You’re constantly [asking], ‘How do I surprise my audience?’ ” says Yeoh, who was in Prague filming the Blade Runner television series when the project came her way. “When I read the script, I was like, ‘This is it!’ “

For Sethi, Yeoh was the ideal lead. “She just has the demeanor of a doctor. She’s in full command of her body,” he says of the actress, who spent her childhood training as a ballet dancer. “A surgeon is a lot like a military commander. [Operating rooms] often have a more rigid hierarchy than any other part of the hospital, and they have to be crisp and decisive people.”

In the lead-up to filming in Dublin, Yeoh committed herself to authentically embodying a surgeon, attending in-person instruction at the Royal College of Surgeons. “Everybody was looking at her like, ‘Why is Michelle Yeoh at this dissection?’ ” recalls Sethi. “But she just was walking around like it was nothing.” An on-set doctor, Dr. Dara O’Keefe, consulted with the actress on everything from how high her elbows should be as she makes an incision to where her fingers should be positioned, while Sethi‘s twin brother, a surgeon himself, Dr. Rosh Sethi, sent Yeoh video guides on how to hold scalpels.

While a genre film starring an Academy Award-winning global star is the ideal fodder for any studio slate, the filmmakers never showed the script to studios, instead opting to make the film independently in order to “preserve its originality” and its “unusual approach to action,” says the director.

The Surgeon includes enough action sequences and complicated medical prosthetics to make even the most seasoned indie producer sweat, and was shot in just 26 days. Sethi and Yeoh were often satisfied doing one take for most shots. “For all of what I’m sure are my many flaws, I’m never slow,” says Sethi.

And while it never gets in the way of the action, The Surgeon takes the time to explain the anatomy and science behind what the audience is witnessing. “The fact that it might be real is part of what makes it interesting to watch. You feel like you’re being exposed to something that you didn’t know before,“ says the director. Limiting audiences’ suspension of disbelief is also why Sethi wanted “M.D.“ included at the end of his name in the credits, which required some lobbying with the directors’ guild. “The guy I spoke to [at the DGA] said that he was in charge of all MDs,“ remembers Sethi. “And I was like, ‘Has this come up before?‘“ (Sethi wasn‘t given an answer.)

One particular point of pride for Sethi is a scene involving a prolapsed anus. He first glimpsed the condition on his first day as a medical student and says that ever since, he has “always wanted to put that in something.”

With The Surgeon, the director finally fulfilled his dream to get a wayward sphincter on the big screen. You’ve been warned.

This story appeared in the Sept. 2 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.