Lucy Liu received Locarno Film Festival\u2019s career achievement award Thursday, and presented her new film \u201cRosemead<\/a>,\u201d which had its international premiere at the festival. Liu talked with Variety about the film, which she stars in and produces.<\/p>\n In Eric Lin\u2019s film, Liu plays Irene Chao, a Chinese-American single parent who is battling health issues, while caring for a son who has been diagnosed with schizophrenia. The film is based on a true story, and is inspired by an L.A. Times article by Frank Shyong.<\/p>\n More from Variety<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cThe heartbreak is not only what happened but how it happened: knowing that there were other options, but that Irene felt there weren\u2019t any,\u201d Liu says.<\/p>\n The film deals with a range of ideas within the Chinese-American community regarding mental health, from the son\u2019s Chinese therapist to Irene\u2019s friend who believes he should be treated with herbs and chanting to others in the community who just see his schizophrenia as shameful.<\/p>\n Liu is prepared for some in her own community to not accept the film. \u201cIf my mother saw this movie, she wouldn\u2019t believe it,\u201d she says. \u201cShe would be like: This is the worst piece of fiction.\u201d<\/p>\n Part of the difficulty was the silence surrounding the family itself. \u201cAs there was not a lot that was known about this family, the script had to be pieced together,\u201d Liu says. \u201cIn some ways, it\u2019s a little bit of a thriller, because people know the final act and some of the details, and then the rest had to be kind of filled in, in order to understand the dynamic between Irene and her son.\u201d<\/p>\n Irene\u2019s husband had been diagnosed with brain cancer and died very soon afterwards, and this seemed to have triggered their son\u2019s schizophrenia. At the same time, Irene had also been diagnosed with cancer. \u201cShe had become very fragile and aged enormously in that time.\u201d<\/p>\n For an actor usually associated with action scenes and dynamism, Liu is almost unrecognizable as Irene, shuffling painfully and speaking heavily accented English, but she downplays the transformation. \u201cI think her physical suffering was nothing compared to her emotional suffering. From the acting point of view, it was important to show the love, and her will, because her strength was coming from her will, her will to stay alive and to be vibrant for her son. That was the act of love. If you just were told the elevator pitch, you could walk away saying, this woman is a monster, right? Yes, like, \u2018Who would want to watch that?\u2019 But that\u2019s not the theme of the story. The theme is love.\u201d<\/p>\n Would she like to produce more films? \u201cProducing is hard, right? So I\u2019d have to really love the project as I love this one. I think that it\u2019s such an important thing to be passionate about what you do so that you can feel connected to it from the ground up. And I would love to continue doing things that are not just commercial movies. I do have some things coming up.\u201d<\/p>\n Liu also feels taking control is not just deciding what to do but also to not necessarily have to do anything. \u201cI don\u2019t feel like I have to necessarily keep running on the treadmill at the same rate,\u201d she says. \u201cSometimes it\u2019s actually faster than I thought it would be, but sometimes I can also step off. I never thought I could do that before, but actually, everything stopped during the pandemic, and we\u2019re still breathing. And I think that\u2019s something maybe we forgot. The scaffolding is always there that we are. We remain who we are, and if anything, it\u2019s strengthened us. Not unlike Irene, the question is: how much can you endure?\u201d<\/p>\n Best of Variety<\/strong><\/p>\n Sign up for Variety’s Newsletter<\/a>. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook<\/a>, Twitter<\/a>, and Instagram<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source uk.news.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Lucy Liu received Locarno Film Festival\u2019s career achievement award Thursday, and presented her new film \u201cRosemead,\u201d which had its international premiere at the festival. Liu talked with Variety about the film, which she stars in and produces. In Eric Lin\u2019s film, Liu plays Irene Chao, a Chinese-American single parent who is battling health issues, while […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1961918,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25173],"tags":[345802,345801,345800,345803],"class_list":["post-1961917","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists","tag-chinese-american","tag-irene-chao","tag-lucy-liu","tag-schizophrenia"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/\u2018How-Much-Can-You-Endure-EXCLUSIVE.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1961917","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1961917"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1961917\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1961918"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1961917"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1961917"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1961917"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}