Meet Simu Liu: the actor playing Marvel’s first Asian superhero Shang-chi is battling global stereotypes
Cinema
The Chinese-Canadian plays a martial-arts master in 2021’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, which Marvel hopes will be an Asian Black Panther
Charley Lanyon
Published: 5:00am, 7 Dec, 2019
This hotel room in West Hollywood, dimly lit with the curtains drawn, shows no signs of film-star excess. No half-full bottles of flat champagne, no overflowing ashtrays. No powder-flecked mirrors on the countertops. No cracks in the plasma television. Just some fresh clothes folded neatly over a chair and, on the table in front of us, a Nintendo Switch and a big bag of sour candies.
And anyway, its occupant isn’t exactly a film star. At least not yet. Thirty-year-old Simu Liu clears off a spot on the couch and apologises for the mess. This room – what a TripAdvisor review might deem “perfectly adequate” – has been his home for the past few months. The only clues Liu has spent that time intensively training are empty Muscle Milk cartons strewn around the place. That and the muscles themselves, defined but not ostentatious under a form-fitting shirt.
As we talk, Liu is the consummate Canadian: welcoming, warm and unfailingly polite. He seems relaxed. Rested. There’s little to indicate this sweet, earnest Torontonian may soon count himself among the most famous actors in the world.
“Kids are going to dress up like me for Halloween,” he beams.
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Shang-Chi is a fictional character, often called the Master of Kung Fu. Photo: Marvel
We’ll have to wait to confirm this, but the prediction is not outlandish. Liu has been tapped for the eponymous lead role in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, due out in 2021: the Marvel cinematic universe is about to get its first Asian superhero.
Asian-Americans make up 6 per cent of the United States population but account for only 1 per cent of leading roles in Hollywood, according to a 2018 study by the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, in Los Angeles.
The buzz is unanimous in hoping that Shang-Chi will do for Asians what Black Panther (2018) did for Africans: barnstorm sorely lacking mainstream representation; prove non-white stories can deliver at the box office; and, in this case, sell a few tickets to China’s coveted cinema-going millions.
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Chinese-Canadian actor Simu Liu will play Marvel Cinematic Universe's first major Asian superhero Shang-Chi. Photo: AFP
While there has been progress – recent films Crazy Rich Asians (2018), Abominable (2019) and The Farewell (2019) cast Asian actors and focused on Asian experiences – the enormity of the exposure and sheer cultural clout of an Asian Marvel hero is unprecedented.
“When I found out Simu got the role, I literally screamed in my car,” says Philip Wang, an LA-based actor and a co-founder of Wong Fu Productions who has worked extensively with Liu. “This is a guy who truly deserves the mantle of being the first Marvel superhero Asian lead.”
Liu’s trip to San Diego Comic-Con, in July, where he met fans who will likely define his celebrity – and had lunch with Angelina Jolie – left him delighted but reeling.
“It’s terrifying,” he says. “When I got the call from Marvel, I was crying, just hysterical, and I remember thinking immediately after, ‘Why am I crying?’ I think it was because this is such a wonderful opportunity, and my life is going to change forever. But I am going to have to say goodbye to certain parts of my life. There’s a kind of grieving process that has to start as well.”
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A young Liu. Photo: courtesy of Simu Liu
Liu never expected to be an actor. Just six years ago his career consisted of one on-screen appearance as an uncredited extra. But now he has only a year or so to go from being a Chinese-Canadian immigrant with zero martial arts experience to playing the greatest kung fu master in the universe.
There’s a phrase in Hollywood for what he is about to experience: “the Chris Pratt effect”, cannonballing from well-liked supporting sitcom actor to global superstar shouldering a profitable film franchise. He may be smiling – he’s always smiling – but inside, Liu is freaking out.
Even he describes himself as a “partial celebrity”. Liu is recognised in LA mainly by his visiting countrymen, thanks to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s runaway 2016 hit Kim’s Convenience, centred on a Korean immigrant family in Toronto. Liu played Jung Kim, a reformed bad boy, or as a friend recently squealed, “the super hot one”.
Always a critical darling – Ashley Westerman, at National Public Radio, in the US, described the show as “quippy and smartly written” and said it “found lasting success in being both funny and deep” – Kim’s became a bona fide global hit after premiering on Netflix last year.
Pivotal, no doubt, but to equate Liu’s story with Kim’s would be to fail him, and to do that thing Liu condemns so vocally: reduce a wrenching, triumphant and unique immigrant story into something bite-sized and saccharine for mass (read: white) audiences.
Simu Liu was born on April 19, 1989, in Harbin, the capital of China’s northernmost province, Heilongjiang, best known for its frigid winters, annual ice festival and namesake beer. He was raised by his grandparents after his parents moved to Canada to attend graduate school at the prestigious Queen’s Univer*sity in Kingston, Ontario, intending to send for him once they were established.
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Liu’s years in Harbin had their privations – even running water was intermittent – but his “gentle and patient” grand*parents doted on him and he was happy. When he turned five, everything changed. Liu’s father arrived in Harbin to collect his son – the earliest memory he has of his dad – and take him across the world to Mississauga, a bland western suburb of Toronto, Ontario, and a common landing point for middle-class Asian immigrants.
The adjustment was harsh, and not just because it was every bit as cold as Harbin. Liu went from being the coddled firstborn and only son in a traditional Chinese home to a much less forgiving situation: the firstborn and only son of young, first-generation immigrants who had sacrificed everything for his eventual, and very much expected, success.
Instead of his grandparents’ loving warmth, there was criticism, pressure and, as Liu wrote in an open letter to his parents in Canadian magazine Maclean’s, in 2017, levels of affection limited to “letting ‘put on a jacket, it’s cold outside’ stand in for ‘I love you’”.
Liu studied finance at the University of Western Ontario – like Queen’s, one of Canada’s Ivy League-level institutions – then bagged a parent-pleasing job at accounting power*house Deloitte, in downtown Toronto. There was just one problem: “I was a serial slacker,” Liu says, laughing. “I just wasn’t a motivated person.” He was soon fired for what he says were obvious reasons. “Make no mistake, I was doing a subpar job.”
Quote:
I realised I had been living my life all wrong. The more times you get to redefine yourself, or get to change the course of your destiny, the more you want to do it
Simu Liu, actor
Adrift and feeling that he had nothing to lose, when he saw a casting call on Craigslist for extras to appear in Pacific Rim (2013) – a sci-fi film being shot by Guillermo del Toro in Toronto – he went for it. Try as you might, you won’t be able to pick him out of the crowds on-screen, but the experience was life-changing.
“I realised I had been living my life all wrong,” he says. “The more times you get to redefine yourself, or get to change the course of your destiny, the more you want to do it. The more you learn not to take the world as it is, the more you learn to see what things should be. For people who may not have had those catastrophic failures in their life, they might not have the ability to do that.”
The former slacker began hustling for roles, winning forgettable walk-on parts in films and a few lines in cheesy television action shows. And when he couldn’t land an acting gig, he worked as a stuntman.
Then, in 2015, he got his first break, in Blood and Water, a little-watched drama targeting Canada’s Chinese popula*tion, in English, Cantonese and Mandarin.
“Although I was a pretty new actor, it was the first time I had been part of anything of that calibre,” Liu says. “And it was the first time I felt like I had a platform. True, it was a tiny Canadian show that nobody ever watched, but I was a series regular.”
His role as Paul Xie, the secretive son of a billionaire real-estate developer whose brother is murdered, helped him secure representation – he is still with the same managers – and brought him to the attention of the Kim’s Convenience casting agents.
