We were sitting, unusually, in a furniture showroom above an interior-decorating boutique run by a friend of Liu’s. As we began to talk about her eye-catching career as a karate-chopping, ass-kicking Asian babe – highlighted in Charlie’s Angels and Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol 1 – I couldn’t help noticing that she was curling up ever tighter as she tried to unfreeze her legs. First she clutched at the sofa’s furry pillows. Then she tried wrapping her legs in her sweater. She is only 5ft 3in tall and, though she’s 37 now and scarcely an ingénue, she looked like a shivering rabbit. I was beginning to feel I should offer her my trousers, but what stopped me, of course, were all those cinematic images of Liu in man-eating kung-fu overdrive. As Alex Munday in Charlie’s Angels, Liu calmly tells one of her enemies: “Just by activating the right energy points, you can improve the circulation, alleviate pain… or knock a man unconscious.” She twitches a thumb and her victim collapses on the floor.
So, I began by asking her, after all that martial-arts training, could she really ward off an unwanted man with a casual flick of her foot? “I can be pretty scrappy,” she replied. “But I think I was scrappy already because I grew up in Queens, New York. I don’t know if Charlie’s Angels helped, but it certainly didn’t hurt.” Yet it is a very different kind of film that drew her to this boutique for our interview.
In the opening scenes of 3 Needles, Thom Fitzgerald’s new drama on the global reach of Aids, Liu appears as a heavily pregnant Chinese peasant who is stopped and searched by soldiers. It is immediately clear that her character is in trouble – especially when supplies of black-market blood are found hidden in her van. At this point, I suggested to Liu, her martial-arts fans might expect her to rip off her pregnancy disguise, pull out a samurai sword, and briskly dispatch the soldiers. Instead, she meekly submits to gang rape. She laughed. “This is the kind of work I used to do: independent films, characters that don’t speak English. This is something I’m actually more interested in doing and going towards.”
3 Needles is an ensemble film with three interwoven stories of disease set in China, South Africa and North America. Liu appears only in the Chinese segment, but she quickly makes clear that her role as Jin Ping, a poorly educated village woman who doesn’t realise that her black-market blood is spreading death, is much closer to her own heart than any amount of karate. She may have become a Hollywood millionaire, but Liu has never shaken off the poverty of her upbringing. Born in New York to Chinese immigrant parents who struggled to feed their family, “You understand there’s other things outside of where you are,” she said. Her father would hang a picture of an emaciated child on the kitchen door whenever the family sat down to eat.
“It was a reminder that what we have we should really be grateful for, and that however little we had, there were people elsewhere who were suffering or starving.” If that sounds a bleak notion of family meal times, equally grim was the food she was served for much of her childhood: boiled rice and cucumber. As a result, “I’m probably the least picky eater you’ve ever met,” she laughed. “Take me anywhere, I’ll eat it.”
It was at the University of Michigan in 1988 that Liu took her first steps towards a show-business career. She had been studying Asian languages, and had seen nothing in American popular culture to suggest there was an opening for a Chinese actress. “I’d never seen any Asian doing the lead in any form of American literature.” When she decided to audition for a part in an alternative production of Alice in Wonderland, she was hoping for the usual supporting role.
“I went up to the board to see if I’d been chosen, and found my name. Then I traced my finger across the notice to see what part I had, thinking it would be the Caterpillar, or Cheshire Cat, or whatever. And it said ‘Alice’.” An enterprising director had thought it would be interesting to cast an Asian Alice, and nobody was more shocked than Liu. “I thought it was a serious mistake, I really did. I looked at the notice for 10 minutes, trying to go through my mind what had happened, and then I realised I had kind of stereotyped myself. I’d never seen myself centre stage, because it just didn’t seem feasible from my experience at that time.” ()
From that moment, she was hooked. On stage as Alice, “I had never felt so at home, so comfortable and alive.” She also became convinced that the acting career she had feared was just a pipe dream might be achieved the way her immigrant family had taught her: by persistence and hard work. “I came back to New York and started doing theatre, put together a false résumé of things I’d never done and sort of hit the pavement.”
She worked in a restaurant, taught aerobics, sold T-shirts on the street. She acted in a couple of commercials, then turned to regional theatre. One of her agents eventually suggested she move to Los Angeles. After an unglamorous Hollywood start as a corporate breakfast caterer – “I would get up at 3 in the morning and make omelettes and pancakes” – she began to find small parts in successful television series. “I think I was getting roles because they were looking for a certain type: immigrants that didn’t speak English, who had just come over from China, whose husband had died on the boat, or I was just the baby-sitter,” she said.
She worked briefly on Beverly Hills 90210, LA Law, ER, and The X Files. Her break came in 1998 when David Kelley, the creator of the hit TV series Ally McBeal, cast her as Ling Woo, a malevolent lawyer who became one of the show’s most popular characters. That led to a series of more prominent film roles, notably as the kidnapped Princess Pei Pei in Shanghai Noon, a martial-arts spoof starring Jackie Chan.
Liu was still under contract to Ally McBeal when she was approached with a dream role. The producers of a film version of the Charlie’s Angels TV series wanted her to join Drew Barrymore and Cameron Diaz as the curvaceous crime fighters who save the world without ever smudging their mascara. Ally McBeal’s producers initially told Liu that they could not release her from their own filming schedule. But the Angels role meant more to Liu than a large pay cheque and a new dimension of celebrity: “This was pop culture and an opportunity for an Asian actress to be part of Americana in a way that was global. I thought from the start that it was about having ethnicity become an official part of Americana. In the original Charlie’s Angels they were all Caucasian, and this was an opportunity to change that without it being some kind of giant political statement.”
She talked Kelley into releasing her, and karate-chopped her way into movie history. Charlie’s Angels made $265m at the global box office in 2000, and its sequel three years later added another $260m. It’s clear that Liu’s Chinese heritage is enormously important to her, but it has to be said that turning herself into a saucy wonder woman seems to be more about pandering to American stereotypes, not shattering them. “If anything, I’ve had to learn to be Asian the way that other people see Asians,” she admitted. “I never did kung fu before this; wielding swords is not something I really do during my time off.”
