Cheng lands big Netflix role.
Reporter turned actor plays royal concubine
When Olivia Cheng heard the name Weinstein, her ears twigged. It was late 2013, and the Edmonton-raised reporter-turned actor was on the telephone with her agent, who was telling her about a new TV series for which she might want to audition.
The prolific Weinstein Company was producing Marco Polo, a show about the famed explorer’s adventures in Kublai Khan’s court in 13th-century China, and there were roles for actors of Chinese and Mongolian ethnicity in Cheng’s age range.
Immediately, Cheng got excited.
“I could tell from the calibre of the people involved that this was something very big,” she says by telephone from Toronto. Before long, Cheng had made the U.S. shortlist, and by last January, she was in Los Angeles chatting with the show’s directors, Joachim Ronning and Espen Sandberg, of Kon-Tiki (2012) fame.
“They say they saw something in my tape right away and it set me apart from the pack,” Cheng recalls.
Cheng has one of the principal roles in Marco Polo, Netflix’s most expensive original production to date, not to mention one of the priciest series ever made for television.
The New York Times has reported it will cost $90 million to produce 10 episodes, a massive budget that’s second only to that of HBO’s Game Of Thrones.
Filmed in Italy, Kazakhstan and Malaysia, the East-meets-West saga will be available for streaming on Netflix on Dec. 12. And given Netflix’s track record of hot original series (House of Cards, Orange is the New Black), you can bet many will give Marco Polo a try, especially given its promise of sex, politics and epic battle scenes with hundreds of extras.
It’s all thrilling for Cheng, 35, who’s been working hard in the industry since she landed her first role in the Emmy-winning miniseries Broken Trail opposite Robert Duvall and Thomas Haden Church in 2005. In Marco Polo, she plays a royal concubine named Mei Lin.
“She’s awesome,” Cheng says. “I really love Mei Lin as a character. She’s a young mother and I liken her to the girl from the wrong side of the tracks.
“She’s based on the real woman in the Song Dynasty, and very little is known of her. In our rendering of Mei Lin, she’s got this warrior spirit and is fiercely protective of her daughter. She’s blackmailed to infiltrate the Mongolian kingdom to get closer to the Khan for her brother’s political purposes.”
Cheng, who is based in Vancouver, appears throughout the first season of the show, which also stars Lorenzo Richelmy, a relative unknown outside Italy, as Marco Polo, and Benedict Wong (Prometheus, Moon) as Kublai Khan.
Cheng had the time of her life filming Marco Polo in a secluded region of Malaysia earlier this year.
“The coolest thing for me was having the opportunity to do stunt training.”
Working with world-class stunt teams, “I got to learn wushu, stunt choreography, and fly around on high wires for two key fight scenes.”
From the moment we meet Mei Lin in the first episode of Marco Polo, Cheng’s role requires courage, maturity and a willingness to appear naked on screen. No surprise; she is a kept mistress who wields her bedroom skills to benefit her brother Jia Sidao (played by Chin Han).
She’s had to do tough scenes before. In Broken Trail, Cheng played a traumatized Chinese prostitute and did a rape scene opposite Dwight Yoakam, who played her attacker.
There are obvious parallels between that role and the role of Mei Lin, but Cheng says she isn’t worried about being typecast or only getting parts based on her ethnicity.
“Here’s the thing: I am Chinese, and this is a killer role. And I’m so glad to have a role that resonates for me culturally, historically. Most of my
“Here’s the thing: I am Chinese, and this is a killer role.”
OLIVIA CHENG
career has been colour-blind, and this is a very rare opportunity that’s really meaningful for me as a Chinese Canadian.”
In the early 2000s, Cheng worked as a reporter at Global Television and as a freelance writer for the Edmonton Journal. Her experience with Broken Trail cemented her desire to leave the media and pursue acting full-time. She moved to Vancouver in 2006 to study the craft.
Since then, Cheng has enjoyed parts in both film and television projects, including USA Network’s Fairly Legal, CW’s Supernatural and Arrow and CBS’s Flashpoint. She also played the title role in Iris Chang and the Rape of Nanking (2007), a feature documentary by Toronto indie Real to Reel Productions.
ewithey@edmontonjournal.com Twitter.com/lizwithey