Lucy Liu Enjoys Big Screen Renaissance
By wchung | 02 Feb, 2025

Starring roles in movies helmed by big-name directors return the spotlight on a true Asian American Hollywood warrior.

Lucy Liu's two most recent acting gigs fall on opposite ends of the Hollywood spectrum.  One is a dark, enigmatic character role in another atmospheric small-budget Steven Soderbergh experiment.  The other is the trope of a secret government agency boss in a big-budget holiday mock-thriller directed by popmeister Jake Kasdan.  Together these roles extend the repeating series of contrasting bricks lining the path of Liu's 35-year acting career.

In Presence, released January 25, Liu plays Rebecca Payne, wife and mother in a dysfunctional family that has just moved into a suburban mansion.  The place is haunted by a poltergeist.  One assumes it's the vengeful spirit of the victim of an earlier violent death. Rebecca struggles to control tensions from both her corrupt business dealings and alienation from her husband and daughter as events hurtle quietly toward another violent death.

The veteran actor enjoyed Soderbergh's total faith in her ability to extract the requisite nuances from her character.

"Steven does not give direction unless he has to," Liu told Vanity Fair.  "He didn't talk to us about anything other than choreography."

Soderbergh was probably too busy scurrying silently around the house in kung-fu slippers capturing the ghost's view of events, perhaps recreating for himself the artistic joy of crafting a cinematic trailblazer like the voyeuristic Sex, Lies and Videotape, the film he shot in 1989 at a cost of $1.2 mil.  Not only did it go on to rake in $37 million (about $120 mil in 2025 dollars) in global box office but also became a critically acclaimed piece of cinematography deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and added to the National Film Registry in 2006 by the Library of Congress.

Presence was made for $2 million (about $600,000 in 1989 dollars).  The $5 mil it logged at the box office through January 2025, and the generally positive critical reviews, gives it a shot at matching Sex, Lies's cost/box ratio.  

Red One, released November 15, 2024, has proven to be the antithesis of Presence in both financial and critical terms.  It boasts extravagant special effects, an exotic locale and a budget-buster cast that includes Dwayne Johnson and J. K. Simmons.  It was produced for an estimated $200 - $250 million and boxed receipts of $186 mil. along with generally rotten reviews.  It's whispered that about $50 million of the cost overrun can be credited to Johnson's perpetual over-the-top tardiness.

The movie imagines an alternate universe that mashes a heartwarming Santa Claus with a mock-sinister global power framework in which Liu plays Zoe Harlow, the grimly secretive head of MORA (Mythological Oversight and Restoration Authority).  The convoluted action doesn't bear recounting.  It suffices to say that Liu's Harlow taps into the coolly grim authority she displayed as Alex Munday and O-Ren Ishii (Cottonmouth), the two roles from the Charlie's Angels and Kill Bill sequences of the early aughts that define Lucy Liu in the minds of movie fans.

Lucy Liu calls to mind an old adage about the smallest peppers being the hottest. At 5-1 she's a full head shorter than Charlie's Angels co-star Cameron Diaz (5-9), tinier even than the petite Drew Barrymore (5-4). Yet there's no question as to who — in a stiletto-à-stiletto free-for-all — would kick whose tightly-clad butts. It isn't so much Liu's reputed training in an Indonesian fighting art as her no-roles-barred attitude.

On the long, treacherous climb toward the top of the Hollywood heap, Liu has beaten out legions of taller, shapelier, prettier and more talented Asian actors by her commando-style readiness to do more in less. Think leather-strapped dominatrix (City of Industry (1997) and hooker/stripper/nympho scenes in various B-, C- and D-movies. Even back in those desperate early days, Liu had the ambition and foresight to know that she didn't want her real name attached to the seamiest roles. She often worked under the elegantly deceptive Lucy Lui or the more flambouyant Lucy Alexis Liu.

A remarkable thing about Lucy Liu's career is that her breakthrough into the ranks of bona-fide A-movie sex-symbols came at the relatively ripe age of 31. That was how old she was when the first Charlie's Angels movie opened in 2000. Her co-stars were, respectively, 28 and 25 — and both had achieved stardom years earlier. Three years later in her second big screen stint as the high-kicking Alex Munday, Liu earned a reported $4.8 million, quintupling the $850,000 from her first Angel outing. That's less than the reported $8 million and $12.5 million, respectively, for her fellow Angels, but considerably more than any other Asian American actress has ever made.

Not bad for a little girl born into a struggling Chinese immigrant family in Queens, New York on December 2, 1968 — especially one who grew up seeing herself as the most repulsive of ugly ducklings.

“I was as thin as a pipe cleaner, with short, short hair,” she told Red magazine. “My mother would cut my hair all the way round my head like a bowl because she thought it was cleaner. You couldn't tell if I was a boy or a girl. I had hand-me-down clothes; I was skinny, gaunt and generally unattractive.”

That self-image survived into adulthood in the form of a painful shyness and awkwardness.  In the fast-paced social environment of NYU, she was a fish out of water. She endured it for a year, then transferred to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. She combined acting, dancing and singing with a degree program in Asian languages. She also studied kali-escrima-silat, an Indonesian knife-and-stick martial art which, decades later, would prove useful to her acting career. 

Her career has been as hardscrabble as any. It began in 1986 when she landed an LA Law walk-on. The next 14 years saw her in two dozen TV bit parts. She went to Hong Kong for her first film role in a melodrama called Rhythm and Destiny (Ban wo zhong heng) (1992). Her first American film role was in Protozoa (1993), a zero-budget student film. In 1995 she first used the Lucy Lui alias for her role as a hooker in the indie Bang (aka Big-Bang Theory). She reused it in several more of the 16 small, often demeaning, film parts that preceded the first Charlie's Angels. For roles she deemed less embarrassing, Liu tried out Lucy Alexis Liu. More recently, as she gained a measure of respectability and success, she has shortened it to Lucy Liu.

Fifteen-odd years of toiling in obscurity and poverty seem to have taken a toll on Liu's image. The internet is sprinkled with porn sites advertising "Lucy Liu Nudes". Some even claim to offer "Lucy Liu Hardcore". Many such offerings appear to be stills taken from her various film scenes depicting sex or stripping, but a few sites claim to offer images from other sources. The front pages of some display photos of Liu in the nude or wearing see-through lingerie.  Liu has declined to comment on these and other issues despite repeated requests through her publicist.

Liu's big break came in the form of her Ling Woo role in the Sep 21, 1998 episode of Fox's Ally McBeal series. Ironically, this opportunity seems to have materialized in large part because of her spiciest — not to say seediest — earlier film roles. Initially Liu had auditioned for the bit part of the lawyer Nelle Porter. She didn't get it, but series creator David Kelley saw something else in the struggling Asian actress — a chance to juice up the series by introducing a character exuding the unbridled sexuality Liu had exhibited as a leather-fetish dominatrix in City of Industry (1997). Liu seized on the small TV role with do-or-die determination. Her rendering of a maneater of voracious appetites was titillating enough to boost the show's ratings and turn her into one of its more noticed regulars.

Time and again an actor who comes to embody sexual fantasy has become as good as gold in Hollywood's economy. Liu was no exception.

As Ling Woo she was given dragon lady lines like, “A woman hasn't got true control of a man until her hand is on the dumb stick,” and, ”There's nothing I enjoy more than seeing a happy couple and coming between them.” The character is a self-described “tramp” addicted to casual sex. She also uses sex as a tool to get her way with men.

Before long rumors were flying about Liu's real-life sexual habits, her supposed fondness for casual sex and disinterest in settling into longterm relationships. Fantasy and reality seem to have had little connection with each other. Liu has suggested that she wasn't dating during that period.

From the Asian American perspective, the most controversial aspect of Lucy Liu's love life has been the rumor that she doesn't date Asian men. That's hardly surprising. As a girl Lucy received no positive attention from Asian boys. Even after she became a Charlie's Angel, her looks were disparaged as simply not fitting Asian standards of beauty. And as mentioned, for most of her adult life, Liu simply wasn't dating anyone. 

“Men never asked me out on dates,” she told The Sun of her pre-Charlie era. “People got the impression that I am hard. But I can't blame them because people only know me through television and tough characters in films.” Combine that with Liu's repeated assertions that she has always been too shy to ask a man out, and one must conclude that Liu had become a media-generated sexual fantasy of epic proportions.

That started the offers flowing. In rapid succession she landed the roles of Princess Pei Pei in Jackie Chan's Shanghai Noon (2000) and Alex Munday. The latter not only marked Liu's emergence as a hot screen property, it rehabilitated her own romantic life.

“In movies like Charlie's Angels I show my softer side and I think that comes through,” she told The Sun. “Actually men have started approaching me and asking me out, so I guess all the interviews and the movie have really helped.”

And as she has moved up the food chain, Liu has shown a willingness to throw her metaphoric weight around. In April of 2000, during the shooting of the first Charlie's Angels movie, Liu complained about a bit of dialogue in the middle of a take. Bill Murray piped up to defend the line. An argument ensued and quickly escalated until Liu looked as though she were about to start throwing punches. The other actors scurried into the safety of their trailers. Director McG was forced to end the day's shooting early.

By the fall of 2003 Lucy Liu's acting career was cresting as she became synonymous with spike-heeled fight scenes. In Ecks vs Sever (2002) Liu is the lead female action figure. Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill (2003) exploits her image as a woman inscrutable enough to be exotic, sexy enough to kill — fueling the ages-old male fantasy of having two hot chicks fighting to the death over you. The good woman versus the bad girl. 

Perhaps in reaction against that limiting image, especially for an actor in her late thirties, in 2009 Liu produced and narrated the documentary Red Light which follows several girls over the course of four years as they are kidnapped and sold to brothels in Cambodia.  The film spearheaded Liu's activism at fighting international human trafficking which, at the time, was victimizing 2.4 million young women.  

In March 2010 Liu made her Broadway debut as Annette Raleigh as part of the second replacement cast of Tony Award–winner God of Carnage.  Adapted from an original French script, the play depicts a meeting between the parents of two 11-year-old boys, Benjamin Raleigh and Henry Novak, after Benjamin hit Henry with a stick, breaking two teeth.  The conversation degenerates into a verbal melee, revealing tensions and resentments simmering below the polite facade of upper-middle-class life.  For her portrayal of a wife taking the back seat to a domineering, self-centered husband, Liu received mixed reviews, some suggestimg that her screen acting experience may may not have equipped her to project her character on a live stage.

In March 2012 Liu was cast as Joan Watson in the series Elementary which transports Sherlock Holmes to a modern American setting. In the course of its second seasons the role earned Liu three consecutive People's Choice Awards nominations for Favorite TV Crime Drama Actress.  In 2014 she won the Critic's Choice Television award for Best Drama Guest Actress for her depiction of police officer Jessica Tang on the TV series Southland.

That decade also saw Liu earning directorial credits for six episodes of Elementary, an episode of Graceland, an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and the premiere episode of the second season of Luke Cage.

Her large and growing body of work won Liu an invite to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2013.  She has also received press for her paintings, a passion she had indulged since childhood.

On May 1, 2019 the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce gave its 2,662nd star on the Walk of Fame to Lucy Liu in recognition of her many TV roles.  Liu's star was placed next to that of Anna May Wong, the first Chinese actor to be so recognized on Feb 8, 1960 — almost exactly a year before her death.

Lucy Liu landed her most enduring role in 2015 with the birth of son Rockwell through gestational surrogacy, a choice she explained as being due to the fact that she was still working regularly.  

Flash forward nine years to the premiere of Red One in November 2024 to which she was accompanied by Rockwell.

"I think he forgot that I was in the movie," she told People.  "And then he saw me and started hugging my arm and said he was so proud of me.  I almost burst into tears."