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The American Who Accidentally Became a Chinese Movie Star
The journey of Jonathan Kos-Read, better known as Cao Cao, is a good guide for anyone seeking to make it in China’s budding, chaotic film industry.
By MITCH MOXLEY JULY 14, 2016
Every foreigner living in China has his share of China Stories. Jonathan Kos-Read has more than his share. Here’s one: Not long ago, the 43-year-old American actor received a call with an offer to appear in “Ip Man 3,” the third in a series of biopics about Bruce Lee’s martial-arts master. The role was small, but his agent negotiated what Kos-Read considered an “outrageous” amount of money for it, and the producers agreed. Kos-Read was thrilled until he read the script and noticed another part for a foreign actor — a bigger and better role as a mobster named Frank.
This was troubling. Kos-Read, who is known in China only as Cao Cao, is by far the leading foreign actor working in the country today, having appeared in about 100 movies and television programs since his career began in 1999. He is famous throughout the mainland, and his career has been on a steady upward trajectory. Last December he appeared in the action film “Mojin — The Lost Legend,” currently the fifth-highest-grossing movie in Chinese history. Who, Kos-Read wondered, would the producers have cast instead of him?
Kos-Read sent panicked texts to the movie’s casting director, but they went unanswered. “I felt threatened,” he told me recently, only half kidding. A few days later, he boarded a plane from Beijing to Shanghai to begin filming. When he showed up to the set, the mystery was solved almost immediately: There, slouching on a stool surrounded by a scrum of people, was the former heavyweight champion of the world Mike Tyson. The retired fighter had been cast, perhaps misguidedly, as Frank. (The Village Voice later described Tyson’s performance in the film as “sadly unimpressive.”) Kos-Read introduced himself and over the next three days developed a bond with Tyson. “He was not at all what I expected,” Kos-Read says. The pair discussed their young daughters, Montessori schools and, inevitably, boxing. They also spoke about self-reinvention, something each man knows quite a bit about.
“Ip Man 3” went on to gross $115 million at the box office in China, with more than half of that coming on the opening weekend. China’s booming movie market grew by nearly 50 percent last year and is expected to surpass North America’s as the largest in the world by next year. These days, Hollywood studios hardly greenlight a blockbuster without first asking, “How will this play in China?” The rewards are too vast. “Furious 7,” for example, earned $390 million in China — more than it made in the United States — and was for a time the highest-grossing film ever in the country.
And just as Hollywood has begun to crack the market, Chinese cinema has come into its own. In recent years, Chinese studios have started shifting away from the agitprop that defined their cinematic output for generations and are instead focusing on genres that draw viewers to theaters in any country: action, adventure, comedy. In February, a sci-fi comedy called “The Mermaid” became the highest-grossing movie ever in China within 12 days of its release, earning more than $430 million. Increasingly, Chinese cinemagoers are opting to buy tickets for movies made specifically for them — like those in the “Ip Man” series — not those that pander to them or lecture them. It is in this sort of film that Kos-Read has finally had the chance to act, rather than portray a stand-in for Western imperiousness. If the Hollywood studios really want to understand how to succeed in China, Kos-Read’s journey makes for a kind of accidental guide.
In January, I met Kos-Read at Beijing Capital International Airport to accompany him on a trip to Yiwu, a trading city in Zhejiang Province, 165 miles from Shanghai. From there we would take a van to Hengdian World Studios, the biggest back lot in the world, where he was filming a new TV series.
Kos-Read was tired. He had flown in a few days before from the Bay Area, where his wife and two young daughters live; the actor now splits time between the United States and China, which he has called home for almost two decades. Kos-Read has wavy brown hair, a thick beard streaked with gray and the kind of broad face that looks good on camera. He curses a lot and often wears a look of deep contemplation that borders on exasperation. As we boarded the plane for our 10:30 p.m. flight, he sported a huge calf-length black parka, which he wears on set — Chinese sets are notoriously frigid in the wintertime — and carried a heavy backpack filled mostly with equipment for photography, a personal hobby. The airplane was only half full. Kos-Read lumbered through the center aisle until he reached the last row, where he heaved his backpack onto a seat and plopped down into another as if he were claiming a spot on a long-distance bus.
During the two-hour flight, Kos-Read drank a few cans of Yanjing Beer and discussed his role in last year’s “Mojin.” In the film, he plays a lawyer to a cult leader. After the first act, he turns into a zombie. It was by far the biggest project of his career, with by far the biggest stars, and it increased his already-formidable exposure in China by degrees of magnitude. On our plane, a flight attendant recognized him from the film. (In California, by contrast, he is basically anonymous outside of Chinatowns.) Kos-Read was happy for the opportunity to appear in such a large movie but was disappointed with his performance, which he believes was adequate but not excellent. “In a lot of TV shows, you just have to spit out the lines, really. But in a big movie, you’ve really got to be good,” he told me. “In my first big movie, I stepped up into the big leagues and hit a single.”
Still, acting in one of the biggest Chinese blockbusters of all time is a long way from where Kos-Read began. Raised in Torrance, Calif., he attended an arts high school, where he got interested in acting. He went on to study film and molecular biology at New York University. There, he took a Mandarin course and became determined to master the language. He moved to Beijing in 1997 and drifted, living for a period in a student dorm and forcing himself to speak nothing but Mandarin for a three-month stretch. “Like everybody else, I arrived and bummed around for two years, not knowing what I was going to do, trying to do a bunch of things, failing,” he says. “Teaching English.”
Not long after he arrived, he began dating a Chinese woman named Li Zhiyin, a finance major in college who later became his wife. On one of their early dates, he picked up an English-language listings magazine and saw an ad seeking a foreign actor for a Chinese movie. Kos-Read had never lost his love for performing, and he thought it could be fun to act in China. He auditioned and got the part, which was supposed to pay the equivalent of about $400 for three months of work. In the movie, called “Mei Shi Zhao Shi” (“Looking for Trouble”), Kos-Read plays an American documentary filmmaker following around a group of disillusioned bohemians. He says it took the producers two years to pay him. But two weeks after the movie wrapped, he landed three months of work on a Chinese soap opera.
There were only a handful of foreign actors working in China at the time, and Kos-Read quickly realized he offered filmmakers there a rare combination of traits. He spoke good Mandarin, was a decent actor and had a look that many Chinese consider typically “American”: six feet tall, square jaw, blue eyes. He was able to make a living in the industry, but his early roles weren’t great. At that stage of his career, most filmmakers still had limited exposure to foreigners and foreign cultures, and his early parts tended to reflect Chinese stereotypes of Westerners. He rarely played bad guys, because there are very few American villains in Chinese movies (those roles tend to go to the woeful cohort of Japanese actors working in China). Instead, Kos-Read was often typecast as a “dumb guy,” he says. Most frequently, he was an arrogant foreign businessman who falls for a local beauty, only to be spurned as she inevitably makes the virtuous choice to stay with her Chinese suitor. Sometimes he played the foreign friend whose presence onscreen is intended to make the main character seem more worldly; Kos-Read dubbed another stock character “the fool,” an arrogant Westerner whose disdain for China is, by the end of the movie, transformed into admiration.
When he was studying Mandarin at N.Y.U., Kos-Read adopted a Chinese moniker, as many language students do. He took his, Cao Cao, from a historical general who is also a central character in one of the country’s most revered classical novels, “Romance of the Three Kingdoms.” Like a Chinese King Arthur or Davy Crockett, the original Cao Cao exists in fact and fiction and in between. Kos-Read chose the name because it was easy to remember and because he liked that Cao Cao was a wise, self-reliant man. Years later, the decision would prove wise indeed. To his Chinese audience, it showed that the American, despite his loutish onscreen personae, took an interest in their history and culture.
