In David Henry Hwang's new Broadway show Chinglish, Stephen Pucci plays a ruthless business consultant, a Westerner in China who claims a deep understanding of his adopted culture. The actor was cast for his fluency in Chinese, a necessity in Hwang's playful exploration of how language can often amplify the cultural barriers between China and the West.

For Pucci, Chinglish has provided a rare opportunity to pursue his divergent interests in Chinese language and theater.

"One of the most enjoyable things about working on Chinglish has been to both work on my craft as an actor, but in addition to that be able to use my language skills, something that I never would have thought I would use in acting," he said. "Before Chinglish those two areas of my life were worlds apart."

Pucci majored in modern Chinese studies at the University of Leeds in England, a choice partly motivated by a lifelong love affair with martial arts, he said. As a child he was fascinated by kungfu movies, and in his teen years began to study martial arts in earnest. He said he is naturally inclined to language studies (having studied French, German, Italian and Spanish), so it seemed natural to attempt Chinese.

Chinese proved to be an altogether different animal, and he struggled with contextualizing a language of which he had no cultural knowledge, he said. Many of his classmates had visited China, but what he knew of Asia he had gleaned from martial arts movies, he said with a laugh.

"I felt completely lost from day one," he said. "The first sentence we learned was, 'Please have some tea,' and I thought to myself, 'I don't even drink tea!' It was bizarre and disorienting for me."

His Chinese lessons stressed repetition and drilling in a way that felt "almost militant" he said. He struggled with his inability to grasp concepts that with other languages had come easily for him.

In his second year he traveled to China to continue his language studies at Tianjin Normal University. In addition to his language courses, he immersed himself in kungfu training. As a foreigner who spoke Mandarin, he found that his language skills frequently became the focus of any connection he attempted with local Chinese, he said.

"As a Westerner who speaks Chinese in China, very often the subject of any conversation will be the fact that you speak Chinese," he said. "You're a constant novelty, which is good for the first 15 minutes of the conversation and then it can become laborious. I found it very difficult to penetrate that initial level of connection."

Pucci lived in China a second time following his university studies, a year in which he also reported and wrote for Reuters, he said. He eventually returned to the UK for personal reasons and chose to pursue acting full time.

Pucci's training in martial arts has played an interesting role in his progress as an actor, he said. In fact, while studying at the Central School of Speech and Drama at the University of London, he wrote a dissertation on the effects of training in martial arts on his abilities as an actor, he said.

Martial arts are divided into two categories: "external" (or "hard") martial arts like kungfu, kickboxing and other contact disciplines; and "internal" (or "soft") martial arts, like tai chi. Pucci had studied in the hard martial arts since he was 15 years old.

During his theater program, he was criticized for having an energy that was too aggressive and "forward moving" a quality that served him well in dominating roles but limited his ability to play softer characters, he said.

"I came to the conclusion that my tendency toward being 'external' was a result of my studies in the external martial arts, and I believed a remedy to that was to switch schools to more 'internal' forms, to bring a softer quality to my acting. Tai chi is ultimately about using movement to develop and enhance one's chi, which is internal."

Pucci said he is currently studying to become a tai chi instructor.

"That's the path I've been on since writing that dissertation," he said. "Instinctively, because of my natural physique, the hardness and external muscularity will always be a part of me, but if I can work against that, if I can have both - it's like Yin and Yang. If you can address both hardness and softness, well then you win."

The experience of working on "Chinglish" has been a "wild process", he said. The volume of Chinese audience members has been particularly interesting, he said.

"I've never seen so many Chinese people at the theater," he said. "In my own experiences, the Chinese community are not particularly keen on theater, but David (Henry Hwang) is the forerunner for providing subjects or debates within theater that are of interest to Asian communities in the US and elsewhere, and I think it's encouraged a lot of Chinese people to come see the show."

The production is running in New York indefinitely, but Pucci is considering his next move. He laughed as he recalled emulating Bruce Lee's habit of writing out "grand plans" for what he might accomplish by a certain age.

"When I was younger, I was inspired by Bruce Lee and I wrote out a plan that I was going to go through the Chinese martial arts system and go into acting and film that way. In the kungfu movies I grew up on, there was always a big white guy who didn't speak Chinese and was a terrible actor, and I felt like 'I could be that guy! I'm a good actor and I do speak Chinese!'"

The rise of China in the public consciousness feels inevitable, he said.

"Everyone's looking at China and the US and how they're going to interact, but having studied Chinese for so long, it doesn't feel like a new thing for me. I feel like I've grown up with China in a way," he said.