Andrew Koji worked for this

polygon.com:

Andrew Koji has the weight of an icon on his shoulders.

Ah Sahm, the character Koji plays in Max’s Warrior, was written by Bruce Lee, designed to be played by Bruce Lee, and now lives in a show produced by Bruce Lee’s daughter. An actor hoping to do the martial artist justice could easily fall into another Bruce Lee impression as the easy way out. But that is not Andrew Koji.

While the homages to Lee are certainly present throughout Warrior’s first two seasons — the flick of the nose, the flair of the kicks — Koji enters season 3 having made Ah Sahm his own. Ah Sahm is a martial arts prodigy who travels from China to San Francisco in the late 1870s to look for his sister, but ends up embroiled in the local gang conflict. Koji brings a deep melancholy and an air of uncertainty to a character trying to find his place in a strange new world.

“I knew that there’s no imitating or replicating,” the 35-year-old actor says. “Bruce is a legend, and nobody can be Bruce. But what I believe that he would have wanted me to have done with it, anyone who took on the role, was to bring it to life themselves.”

Koji credits the help of those around him, especially Bruce’s daughter, Shannon Lee, with encouraging him to make the character his own. Lee says she has had “many conversations” with the Warrior star about how to approach her father’s legacy, and encourages Koji to make the character his own.

“The thing that’s beautiful about my father’s legacy is that he really believed in self-actualization. He believed in finding it within yourself and bringing it forward,” Lee says. “And I think that Andrew did an exceptional job this season. I really saw him grow into the role in an all-new way.”

But she can put it even more succinctly than