Do we like Stephen Chow?
Our score: 7 out of 10. A clean record on his own words and a court win on his side, but one contested film and a thin charity file keep him out of the nines.
Stephen Chow is Hong Kong comedy royalty. He won Best Supporting Actor at the 1988 Golden Horse Awards for Final Justice and Best Actor at the 2002 Hong Kong Film Awards for Shaolin Soccer. His last on-screen role was in CJ7 in 2008, and he has been behind the camera since.
Kung Fu Soccer is his first cinema release in seven years, since The New King of Comedy in 2019. It is billed as a spiritual successor to Shaolin Soccer, this time following a women's football team's comeback bid. He wrote and directed it, and it opened in Singapore on 6 August.
The stoush is in Korea. A professor at Sungshin Women's University objected to a fictional Korean side, the “Ewha” team, who are shown faking injuries, fouling and fussing over makeup and circle lenses. He said it was “wrong to repeatedly insult Korean sports” and urged the filmmakers to fix the scenes before overseas release. The reports we read carried no reply from Chow or the production, so where you land depends on whether you read it as slapstick or as a lazy stereotype.
On the harm check, the record is thin rather than ugly. Our searches found no remarks from Chow himself about LGBTQ+ people, trans people, vaccines, climate or migrants. The one political act we found was a photo backing an Election Committee candidate in Hong Kong's late-2025 election; the candidate said Chow backed him because his platform includes boosting local cinema. That is an endorsement, not a campaign against anyone, but it is honest to say we found little of his own on these topics.
The courtroom drama was a money fight. A former partner sued him for more than HK$70 million in alleged commissions, and in December 2020 the Hong Kong High Court dismissed the claim and ordered her to pay costs. The judge found she had not acted as his agent. Chow admitted making the promise but described it as “sweet words” from their courtship, and said the money was a gift.
On the good stuff, we couldn't verify any charity work from reliable reporting, and several net-worth pages that mention a foundation looked like junk. What the record does show is a bloke who, asked on a livestream about acting again, laughed that he has little “concept of acting” and does things his own way. Fans clearly love him, but that's an honest gap, not a glowing reference.