After a yearlong, worldwide search (and following the media bonanza that was the Lion King remake casting announcement), Disney has announced its pick for the star of the upcoming live-action remake of its 1998 animated hit, Mulan: 30-year-old actress Liu Yifei. Social media rejoiced at the choice. Liu’s casting breaks up a string of Hollywood-based bad decisions when it comes to whitewashing, the industry having recently incurred the wrath of audiences and media critics alike for casting actors like Tilda Swinton, Scarlett Johansson, and Emma Stone as characters who were Asian in the source material. Liu was selected from a reported 1,000 other candidates for the role. The actress, who has described herself as a “flexible person” who is “not bound by rules . . . [with] a pretty lenient personality” will lead the film as the Hua Mulan, a female warrior who disguises herself as male in order to take her father’s place in the army in 5th-century China. Here, five things you didn’t know about the star.
Liu, whose birth name is An Feng, also uses the name Crystal Liu, though some fans call her Fairy Sister for her much-praised ethereal looks. In an interview with Cosmopolitan Korea, she demurred such praise this way: “Honestly, I think there are many celebrities out there who are prettier than me. As an actress, it’s not only about looking good on camera, but being able to deliver the right emotions for the characters you play. This makes you more attractive on the screen. That’s why I focus more on acting rather than my appearance.”
She’s already a star: Liu Yifei was a child model, starting with television roles at age 15, while attending the Performance Institute of Beijing Film Academy. She made her film debut in 2002 with The Story of a Noble Family. She has since served as a brand ambassador for Dior, Tissot, Garnier, and Pantene, and most recently starred in the Chinese fantasy romance film Once Upon a Time, which earned $82.3 million in China this summer. Mulan is also not her first Hollywood role. Liu appeared in 2008’s The Forbidden Kingdom alongside Jackie Chan and Jet Li, and 2014’s Outcast with Nicolas Cage and Hayden Christensen. She also starred opposite Emile Hirsch in Danish auteur Bille August’s period romance The Chinese Widow, which opened the Shanghai International Film Festival in June 2017.
Her father is An Shaokang, a 1st secretary in the Chinese Embassy in France and a French language university professor, and her mother is Liu Xiaoli, a dancer and stage performer. Liu is fluent in English and lived in Queens, New York, from age 10 to 14.
She is a triple threat and then some: a model, actress, singer, and dancer, she also formally trained in the piano and signed a recording contract with Sony Music Entertainment Japan in 2005. Her discography includes two albums, a self-titled one that she dropped in China, which W said “genre-hops from lite rock to rap,” and one she released in Japan called The Gate of Late Night.
She is one half of an It couple and has been dating Korean heartthrob Song Seung-heon since 2015, when they costarred in The Third Way of Love.
