How a Marvel tweet, blue spray paint and 'Good Will Hunting' led to Simu Liu's 'Shang-Chi' stardom
Before “Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings,” there was Simu Liu and the Legend of That One Tweet.
In December 2018, Liu had “like 500 followers” when the Chinese Canadian star read that a movie about Marvel’s resident master of kung fu was being fast-tracked for production. Not thinking anyone would listen, he decided to shoot his shot anyway: “OK @Marvel are we gonna talk or what.”
“I just tweeted it out into the ether because I love superhero movies,” Liu, 32, says now. “It's great that I'm getting all the credit now retroactively for getting it right, but I'm sure there are thousands of tweets if you go back far enough of me not getting it right or predicting the future totally incorrectly.”
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But the universe responded – the Marvel Cinematic Universe, that is. Liu, who now has more than 368,000 followers (and over 700,000 on Instagram), is rocketing to stardom as the main man of “Shang-Chi” (in theaters Friday), the mega-franchise's first lead Asian superhero and the most high-profile Hollywood rookie to steer one of its solo films since Chris Hemsworth picked up a magical hammer in 2011’s “Thor.”
In the new martial-arts epic, Shang-Chi (initially flying undercover as Shaun) and his best friend Katy (Awkwafina) go from San Francisco hotel valets to global heroes as they try to foil the latest machinations of Shang-Chi’s father Wenwu (Tony Leung), who wields 10 ancient mystical rings as the leader of a shadowy terrorist organization.
Liu connected with Shang-Chi’s “feeling of being constantly in between worlds and struggling to figure out what path he wants to take. He's at a point in his life where I've definitely been at, this point of uncertainty, maybe a little directionless."
The actor, born in China and raised by his grandparents until he joined his parents in Ontario at age 5, was "miserable" working as an accountant when he decided to play hooky and be an extra on Guillermo Del Toro’s 2013 sci-fi blockbuster “Pacific Rim.” Showing up at 4:30 on a freezing-cold Toronto morning, Liu stripped down and had his entire body spray-painted blue “because an alien had just exploded over Hong Kong and spilled radioactive, glowy blood all over us,” Liu recalls. “It was objectively, from just like a personal comfort angle, terrible, but I came out of it totally enamored and totally in love."
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After appearing on shows such as “Nikita,” “Taken” and “Orphan Black,” Liu was playing rebellious son Jung Kim on the sitcom “Kim’s Convenience” when he blindly sent off his social media missive to Marvel and later had the chance to audition for Shang-Chi. Though one did not necessarily lead to the other.
“I don't think anybody at Marvel saw that tweet,” admits “Shang-Chi” director Destin Daniel Cretton. “It’s a great story so I'm not gonna try to stamp it out. But I also really do believe in putting things out there and saying you're going to get this thing and really going for it.”
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The Matt Damon connection
In auditions, Cretton had potential stars read lines from “Good Will Hunting.” Liu immediately understood that Shang-Chi was supposed to be a deeply complex character, not just a guy who fights.
Like Shang-Chi, Matt Damon's math whiz “is hiding in plain sight," Liu says. "He is working construction, goofing off with his buddies and really just running away from the fact that he has this special thing that makes him unlike anybody else.”
Liu nailed those elements and "impressed us with his acting ability," Cretton says. The director also discovered Liu had universal appeal: At one of the first test screenings for "Shang-Chi," a young, white ex-military man from the South spoke up about “how much he related to Shang-Chi's journey (and) to the idea of being masculine, learning how to tap into your vulnerability, to work through the pain that you've been through,” Cretton says.
Liu found new fans among his peers, too. "He has the talent, the charisma, the intelligence to go very very far and make us all even more proud and to carry the torch and make sure it burns brightly," says Michelle Yeoh, who plays Shang-Chi’s aunt, Ying Nan.
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Simu Liu refuses to 'just toe the line'
The new Marvel star respects his elders, though cops to talking back to his parents and being “very argumentative” as a kid. The only child recalls feeling like “they were the dictators and I had to just follow along. I got to a point where I didn't agree with the direction that they were taking me and I wanted to be my own person.”
We are not an experiment.
We are the underdog; the underestimated. We are the ceiling-breakers. We are the celebration of culture and joy that will persevere after an embattled year.
We are the surprise.
I’m fired the f**k up to make history on September 3rd; JOIN US. pic.twitter.com/IcyFzh0KIb— Simu Liu (刘思慕) (@SimuLiu) August 14, 2021
As an adult, he has no problem calling out issues or people. He’s written essays about recent anti-Asian racism and violence, publicly criticized the "overwhelmingly" white “Kim's Convenience” producers and recently fired off a tweet slamming Disney CEO Bob Chapek for suggesting the theatrical release of “Shang-Chi” will be an “experiment.” (Liu says he didn’t catch any internal flak: “I just wanted people to know that I was fired up about it.”)
“If it's true that I wouldn't have had a career if it weren't for these conversations about diversity, the importance of representation, then I need to continue to fight that battle for the people that come after me,” Liu says. “All around me, I saw people who were taught by their parents, as I was, to just toe the line, not ruffle the feathers, not rock the boat too much and just put your head down, do your work and that's it. And I think that as a community, we're reaching the limitations of that kind of thinking."
Liu's Twitter "will always be a roller-coaster ride," he promises. “I might be tweeting a lot of things in the future, some of which will be absolute idiocy.” But being an Asian star in the Marvel universe is what really holds “special significance" for him.
"I know just how much this movie could mean to so many people."
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 'Shang-Chi': Simu Liu refuses to 'just toe the line' as Marvel rookie
