SINGAPORE — Daniel Wu seems far too old to be a hipster, but you could say he’s pretty cool.

Consider these: The 39-year-old American-born Chinese actor kickstarted his acting career with a gay art house film (Bishonen) and once created a bogus boy band called Alive for his mockumentary on Hong Kong’s pop music industry, The Heavenly Kings.

And with Diversion Pictures, the cool contrarian wants to shake up the Chinese film industry.

The production company he co-founded with fellow actor Stephen Fung was behind last year’s Tai Chi Zero and its sequel Tai Chi Hero, fresh comedic martial arts films that he said goes against Chinese cinema norms like wuxia period flicks.

“For Tai Chi, I was more concerned with how to make the genre a little more fresh, because if you (imitate other successful films), you could end up killing the genre,” he said in a phone interview.

Wu, who’s a relatively new father with six-month-old daughter Raven, added: “When the industry is so saturated with one style of film, people are going to get tired of it, and eventually fall back on watching Hollywood films. We want to do films that people are not really doing, and give a fresh take on it.”

The futuristic thriller project Control is his latest way of spicing things up.

Opening this week, the film revolves around a heart-pumping story of an insurance salesman who is controlled by a mysterious voice through a series of phone calls and blackmail. And it’s a project on which he’s taken a hands-on approach, from bringing in the script from director Kenneth Bi to being involved all the way through to post-production. “(I was) the first person on set and the last to go home,” he revealed.

Control opens in cinemas on Dec 12.