AMC premieres its latest blood-soaked, action-heavy adventure show, Into the Badlands, Sunday night. The six-episode series is set in a futuristic gun-free world where greedy feudal barons and their highly trained assassins battle for control of land, dwindling resources, and a mysteriously gifted young boy. And while Badlands is a perfect companion to the network’s monster hit, The Walking Dead, the show itself doesn’t have monsters. There are no zombies, no vampires, and no dragons; there’s something much rarer. The violent world of Into the Badlands is a bonafide martial-arts extravaganza that delivers all the bone-breaking action and fists of fury you could possibly want, thanks, in large part, to its charismatic lead and executive producer, Hong Kong–based Chinese-American film star Daniel Wu. But Wu’s inspirations for the post-apocalyptic series are not quite what you would expect.

Wu stars as Sunny, the best Clipper (a.k.a. assassin) around, and is joined by Aramis Knight as the aforementioned gifted kid and Emily Beecham as a stylish and lethal Baron called the Widow. Wu may not be a household name in the U.S. (yet), but the actor—who was born and raised in Northern California—has built a massive following overseas. Like many big-budget projects these days, Into the Badlands was unabashedly created to appeal to the East as much as it does to the West. In order to satisfy both audiences, Wu says, AMC has made “a hybrid that works in both cultures.” Fearing the melodramatic style of the martial-arts genre wouldn’t work for American audiences, Wu explains: “We’ve taken that out and we’ve used the strength that AMC has of creating really good character drama and put that in instead.” Asian audiences, he says, “have been watching these shows for a long time—Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Walking Dead—and so, they’re accustomed to that style of drama. One of our goals was to be able to make it work for a broader audience.” In fact it was Wu, in his capacity as executive producer, who helped sell the show to an international distributor and ensure Into the Badlands would air in Asia the same time it debuted in the States.

But, of course, it isn’t just the lucrative Asian market that Wu and AMC are hoping to capture. The show, with its intricate mythology, memorable costumes, and specialized vocabulary, seems tailor-made for the Game of Thrones and Walking Dead–loving Comic-Con crowd. Wu plays Sunny, the best Clipper (a.k.a. assassin) around, with a red leather coat that is sure to make any cosplayer drool. And, according to Wu, the show’s creative team knew exactly what they were doing when they made that coat: “They’re like, dude, Comic-Con next year’s going to be all red trench coats.” Warm-weather cosplayers, beware, Wu says the coat was “the bane of my existence during filming, because fighting in that thing in 90-degree weather and 90 percent humidity in New Orleans was hellish.”

AMC is banking on that coat and the fluid way Wu fights in it to draw audiences in. The show kicks off with an impressive live-action martial-arts fight the likes of which have never been seen on American TV. “When the bones started cracking and blood started spurting, they just started laughing because they had never seen that before,” Wu says describing the New York Comic-Con audience that got a sneak peak of the series last month. “It’s not that they’re laughing at it, they’re laughing at how crazy it was, and how ludicrous the fighting can get in this series. It’s the reaction that we want out of people. It’s the same kind of excitement I feel when I watch this kind of genre of stuff and see things executed well.”

Once again, Into the Badlands show-runners Alfred Gough and Miles Millar owe Wu some thanks for the action scenes looking as slick as they do. Wu—who credits Jet Li for inspiring him to pick up martial arts as a teen in California—was hired as an executive producer before he was cast as the show’s lead and explains that his role “was to make sure that the fighting was done well and with authenticity.” Though Wu is a well-trained fighter, AMC enlisted Huan-Chiu Ku (“Master Didi,” Wu calls him) to help some of Wu’s less experienced co-stars during a six-week fight camp. “He trained Uma for Kill Bill, he trained Keanu for Matrix, he trained a lot of people who didn’t know how to do martial arts and made them look good on-screen,” Wu says before explaining that his role was to cheer his co-stars on. “They were training nine hours a day, and they had probably never done that in their lives. There were days when people were crying, and I just had to keep talking to them and let them realize we’re not trying to make them experts. ‘Just do the best you can, and we’ll make you look good, so don’t worry.’”

And though the series is occasionally weighed down by exposition-heavy world-building, every single fight scene soars. “I think, in terms of the martial arts, there’s never been anything like this on American TV,”  Wu said proudly. And in one very significant way, he’s right. When the martial-arts genre first hit big with U.S. TV audiences, it was a 1970s series called Kung Fu, about a Shaolin monk named Kwai Chang Caine. Though Bruce Lee was considered for the role, he ultimately lost out to Irish-American actor David Carradine. Fast forward 40 years later and Asian men as heroic and romantic leads are still few and far between on U.S. television. In a recent article in The New York Times, comedian Aziz Ansari wrote that when creating his Netflix series Master of None, he and co-creator, Alan Yang, asked themselves, “How many times have you seen an Asian guy kiss someone in TV or film?” Ansari says that they were only able to come up with two examples: Steven Yeun on The Walking Dead and Daniel Dae Kim on Lost. (Someone get them Season 1 of Selfie.)

Enter Wu, who gets to do a fair share of kissing as well as punching and kicking on Into the Badlands. “I have to give kudos to AMC for being adamant about making sure that Sunny was an Asian character,” Wu says. “That was something that they felt very strongly about.” But Wu doesn’t feel quite as adamant. “It’s a great thing,” he agrees of the potential to change the way Asian men are portrayed on-screen, “but I have to say that that wasn’t one of our main goals to start out with. Our goal was really to create a cool martial-arts show for television that people haven’t seen before. Most of my career has been in Asia where I’ve played really strong roles not based on race at all. I didn’t really think about it as being different until I was done [and] realized this is for American audiences and on a really great platform. That is going to make an impact.”

Or, at least, it might make an impact. “I’m reluctant to talk about it right now,” Wu says. “The show has to be successful for it to make that kind of impact. When you interview me in a few years from now, when the show’s still going on, we can talk about that.” He couldn’t ask for a better shot at success. AMC not only ordered the show straight to series, but gave it the plum post–Walking Dead time slot ensuring that even in this crowded TV landscape, Into the Badlands will have a crack at becoming a genuine hit.