Lucy Liu Credit – Victor Demarchelier—AUGUST
Lucy Liu is responsible for some indelible onscreen moments. Like when she swiftly beheads a man who dares to question her character in Kill Bill or (quite literally) whips some sense into a group of businessmen in Charlie’s Angels. Or when, playing herself on Sex and the City, she takes down Samantha Jones after Sam tries to use her name to score a Birkin bag.
For more than 30 years in an industry with a long history of playing into stereotypes, Liu has pushed the boundaries of Hollywood’s imagination when it comes to portrayals of Asian identity onscreen. She became an icon while steadily expanding her range as both an actor and a producer. Liu might turn up anywhere. In the 2010s Sherlock Holmes adaptation Elementary, she played Watson; in the hit Netflix rom-com Set It Up, a demanding boss. And for Steven Soderbergh’s 2024 feature Presence, she was the matriarch of a family living in a possibly haunted house. But last year marked a new turn, with the release of a project Liu had worked on for almost a decade. Rosemead, a somber but poignant film based on real events, follows Liu’s Irene, a widowed Taiwanese American mother in Southern California facing a terminal cancer diagnosis while trying to manage her son Joe’s (Lawrence Shou) worsening schizophrenia.
The film, which Liu also produced, portrays Irene’s loosening grip, which is exacerbated by her isolation from a community that offers judgment and superstition rather than support. As Joe’s condition declines and her own death looms closer, Irene makes a tragic decision, believing it’s for the good of her family.
“It really broke my heart to know that this woman felt so desperate,” Liu says. “This feeling is fairly universal, not just for our community, but in so many other cultures that feel like if they’re not where they should be, that is something they can’t talk about.”
In a season filled with movies about how motherhood can push a person to the brink (like Die My Love and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You), Rosemead stands out for Liu’s sensitive portrayal, and for spotlighting a part of Asian American life that is widely felt but rarely seen onscreen.
Liu says bringing Irene and Joe’s story to life is one step toward making more people feel acknowledged in their struggles. “More stories are out there, and they should have the ability to be received and to be seen,” she says. Making Rosemead was the “beginning of understanding how much more we can do.”
Pulling together any film project can involve challenges that might delay production for years or, often, derail it. What moved Liu to stick with Rosemead was a determination to honor the family at its center and ensure the story was shared widely. “A certain amount of activism has to occur in order to get our stories told,” she says.
Liu, who grew up in Queens, N.Y., as the daughter of Chinese immigrants, found echoes of her own story in Irene and Joe’s relationship: filled with love, but shrouded in secrets kept in the name of protection. “That’s something I’m very familiar with in my own family,” Liu says. “There is so much that I don’t know, and the unknowing creates a sense of restlessness.”
Irene’s isolation becomes extreme, causing her to believe her options for help have run out. Liu says the character has stayed on her mind and likely will remain there for a long time.
The performance has been billed by critics as “career-redefining” for Liu. It might be more accurate to say that Liu herself is—and has always been—a defining force in Hollywood. She’ll be onscreen again this year in more than one anticipated work, including a cameo in the upcoming Devil Wears Prada sequel and a role in the A24/Peacock drama series Superfakes. Of the former, Liu can say little ahead of the movie’s release, though she notes it was fun to be part of the fashion-centric project. In Superfakes, she plays a mother and counterfeit dealer in Chinatown whose dreams of a better life draw her toward New York’s underground crime network—another story about a family trying their best to forge ahead in the world. “It’s a different kind of a struggle,” she says of the show. “That this is even being produced—it’s encouraging that this feels like the right track.”
Write to Mahita Gajanan at [email protected].
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