On a chilly December evening, the sounds of Lucy Liu’s filmography echoed through an upper Manhattan cineplex. Liu had arrived for a post-screening Q&A in support of her new movie, Rosemead, only to hear dialogue from Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair (a special project that combines parts one and two of Quentin Tarantino’s revenge thriller) emanating from a nearby theater. “I couldn’t believe it. I just happened to walk by, and I heard what sounded like my voice,” Liu tells Vanity Fair. “I walked over and it was that scene.”
You know the one. Liu and Uma Thurman play rival sword-wielding assassins who battle to the former’s death in a snow-covered, blood-soaked blowout. It is one of many impressive moments from Liu’s lengthy career, which has seen her turn a successful late-’90s run on Ally McBeal into a diverse oeuvre of action (two Charlie’s Angels movies, two Kill Bill films), intrigue (seven seasons of the network whodunnit Elementary), and romance (Netflix’s Glen Powell springboard, Set It Up). In 2000 she became the first Asian woman to ever host Saturday Night Live, and nearly two decades later, Liu became only the second Asian American actress to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, following in the footsteps of Chinese American actress Anna May Wong, one of the few Asian performers to break through in Hollywood’s golden age.
Liu in Kill Bill, 2003.© Miramax/Everett Collection.
Liu is one of the most recognizable Asian women in film history, but grows weary when reminded of it. “I would love to get rid of the hyphenates. I would really love to just be an artist. I find it really strange that I have to have a title before my craft. I think it’s very limiting,” she says. “I don’t know that anyone’s saying, ‘This is an Australian actress’ or ‘This is an English-slash-Spanish [actor].’ It’s kind of like if you’ve been attached to somebody, and then you have to carry their last name because you were married to them.”
As Liu, now age 57, explains: “I find it to be very imprisoning. Not for me, but for them. Because I don’t walk around looking at myself and saying it out loud. I’m proud of who I am, but I don’t need to always label myself as something.”
Liu’s recent double feature seems to have paid off: Rosemead generated more than $50,000 in ticket sales from a single venue during that aforementioned weekend, netting one of the biggest per-theater openings of last year. Based on a 2017 Los Angeles Times column by Frank Shyong, the film dramatizes the tragic true story of a single Taiwanese American mother named Irene, who secretly undergoes cancer treatment while navigating her teenage son Joe’s (Lawrence Shou) recent schizophrenia diagnosis. Rosemead, which she also produced, marks a rare dramatic leading role for Liu, who adopted a Mandarin accent and shrunken physical posture to play a terminally ill Irene.
