In the movies, nobody is better at being alone than Tony Leung.

In 1994’s Chungking Express, the film that made him a global arthouse pin-up, he plays a police officer so overcome by loneliness, he stalks his apartment in nothing but underwear and a cigarette, talking to his own belongings to rouse the memory of past love. In 2002’s Infernal Affairs—the searing Hong Kong neo-noir Martin Scorsese later remade as The Departed—Leung is a weary mole isolated after a decade undercover in a ruthless triad, desperate for some semblance of normal life.

That inclination for loneliness famously reached its apotheosis in Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love, a breathtakingly stylish masterpiece that’s become a kind of shorthand for yearning for generations of cinephiles. His performance in the film won him Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival and more importantly, true cinematic immortality. Over 25 years later, images of him and co-star Maggie Cheung smoldering through 1960s Hong Kong remain perennial fodder for fashion moodboards on Pinterest, breathless prose on Letterboxd, and retweets on Film Twitter.

But despite that storied career, Leung is still up for new adventures. In the past decade, he’s taken on new challenges and worlds, lending gravitas and believable menace to the 2021 MCU blockbuster Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and dipping his toes in the world of K-pop with a scene-stealing turn in the music video for NewJeans’ global smash “Cool With You.”

Now, Leung is starring in his first European film, the Hungarian filmmaker Ildikó Enyedi’s Silent Friend, an enthralling triptych on the life of plants and the human need for connection. Once again, cinema’s greatest loner is in his element, playing a neuroscientist isolated in a university in Germany, longing to understand the natural world, communing with inanimate objects. Despite a formidable cast that includes Léa Seydoux, Leung’s true co-star is a monumental, centuries-old gingko tree, handsome in its own way.

On a recent trip to New York for a career-spanning retrospective at Lincoln Center, Leung talked to GQ about working with Enyedi, Cannes memories with Wong Kar-wai, and why making a Marvel movie reminded him of the good old days.

GQ: The film revolves around this monumentally massive gingko tree that’s still and wordless throughout so many decades of human activity. It made me think about your own work as an actor. You’ve had so many great moments of perfect stillness and silence on film. Even as early as [the 1989 action film] My Heart Is That Eternal Rose, you were already moving differently than everyone else. How did you learn how to move for the camera? When did you learn that less could be more?

Tony Leung: I don’t know. I think it comes naturally. Starting from day one, I was trying to adjust and find something I really think I like, until I found a style of my own.

This is something I think that started on [the Hou-Hsiao Chen film] A City of Sadness. That really inspired me a lot, especially observing the non-professional actress, my counterpart. I thought she was a talent, a natural. I really wanted to act like her, without any ‘acting skills,’ but as natural as her. Very powerful.

I think that’s rooted inside me. And so, in the 40 years of my acting career, I’m always trying to fine-tune everything. I don’t know when I start to change from this to that, but it’s forever changing. Even now, on Silent Friend, when I saw it with Ildikó at the Busan Film Festival, I found it very different from what I did before—the same kind of silence, but different.