Asian actor Jasper Liu steps into his second decade in the entertainment industry. Fully kitted in the Kingsman collection, he shows us exactly what it means when they say that “style maketh the man”
As heartthrob JASPER LIU steps into his second decade in the entertainment industry, he’s busier than ever before. With two TV series slated for broadcast at the end of the year and his first EP about to launch, the actor speaks to ZANETA CHENG about what the past 10 years have been like, and how he has reconciled self and craft with every undertaking
WHILE MANY OF us were sitting around twiddling our thumbs, thinking about whether we should write that elusive novel or learn a new language during the past several months of pause, actor and Asian heartthrob Jasper Liu has shot two TV shows in which he plays the lead male character and took singing lessons in order to release his first-ever EP.
The first TV series, Twelve Legends, is scheduled to air at the end of the year. A Chinese period fantasy drama set in the Republican era, Twelve Legends centres on Liu’s character, Jin Xingjian, a creature born from a rock mountain that lived for two millennia, and his love story with another creature, Ye Ming, born from a night pearl. In contrast, Use for My Talent, a romantic dramedy that will appear on screens in 2021, is set in the present. In the show, Liu adopts the persona of Gu Renqi, a child of a broken family who’s obsessed with cleanliness and falls in love with his sloppy employee.
“I had a lot of fun playing this character [ Jin Xingjian],” says Liu. “When I first heard I was going to be a mountain, I was pretty excited, because I love nature. But it was quite hard, obviously, because no one I know has lived for 2,000 years, so I couldn’t really reference the people around me for my character. I had to feel the character out as I went along because he’s seen it all in life, having lived for so long. I tried my best to minimise his reactions to everything. That character isn’t human, but the one in Use for My Talent is. I care a lot about cleanliness in my own life, so I tried to magnify that part of myself when I played my character.”
With almost a decade of acting credits to his name, Liu is a veteran when it comes to portraying boyfriend roles. There’s his first leading role in the critically acclaimed 2013 TV series The Patisserie with No Name, a Chinese-language drama where he plays a happy-go-lucky backpacker who gets stranded and starts to work at a patisserie, where he falls in love with the pastry chef. Then there are his more recent roles in the 2018 film More than Blue, in which he portrays a terminally ill patient in a love story – its original Chinese title literally translates to “a story more sorrowful than sorrow” – and the 2019 TV series Before We Get Married, where his character is a morally questionable stockbroker who falls in love with another woman while in a 10-year relationship of his own.
For all the love and adoration Liu gets for his performances today, acting didn’t come easily to him. Living proof of “slow and steady wins the race”, Liu began his acting career with trepidation. “When I first started acting, I wasn’t sure how to express myself and I doubted my abilities as an actor,” he recalls. “I never went to a performing arts school, so when I first landed an important role, I thought a lot about how I needed to act it out. I placed too much focus on how my character looked on-screen and on actions such as how long I needed to turn my head for in a scene, rather than looking within the character and understanding his personality and emotions. When I first started acting, it was pretty tough. Directors would even ask me if I was confused. I lost a lot of self- confidence because I didn’t know how to convey my character properly.”
After extensive training, including taking acting lessons and gaining experience with each role, Liu’s approach to acting has changed dramatically today, though certain challenges remain. “Whenever I land a new role, I try my best to get my script as soon as possible and carry it with me wherever I go,” he says. “This is to try and get a grasp of what it feels like to be my character in real life. Gradually, I learned how to build my movie characters and express who they are from the inside out.”
Being cast in a variety of romantic pairings, Liu feels that playing “the boyfriend” isn’t as easy as it appears. To distinguish one role from another and to bring a different tenor to each part, Liu finds himself looking in the most unexpected places for inspiration. “Since I play a lot of boyfriend roles, I differentiate each of them by finding one distinct characteristic that makes them stand out and focus on that,” he explains. “For example, when I played Ke-huan in Before We Get Married, I focused on changing my gaze and my smile when I saw the female lead in the movie. What I had to see was not a pretty girl, but rather almost a piece of prey. The way I build each character and step into them differs.”
“I usually start by imitating people around me, observing if anyone I know has certain personality traits or mannerisms that I can borrow when I play my character,” he continues. “If not, I turn to other actors who have played similar roles. In this case, for Ke-huan, I actually looked to my director because he has this very cool presence. I remember one time he just went and casually sat on a sofa on a stage in front of 200 people with his sunglasses on. He was smack-bang in the middle and the centre of attention, but he was unfazed. That’s how my character was meant to be. So I learned from him during the entirety of the filming process.”
Rather than having trouble immersing himself in a role, Liu found it somewhat difficult to extricate himself from his character once off-set. “Stepping out of character is easier to do now, but when I was in More than Blue, both being in and out of character was rather tough for me,” he recalls. “I would have to film a crying scene every day and by the end of it, playing my character really took a toll on me. I was tired of crying, tired of being sad and tired of feeling that I wanted to live because my character was dying. That character engulfed me and
I lost a lot of weight – I was only 64 or 65 kilograms back then. A lot of people actually came to visit us while we were filming, so the atmosphere on set was really lively, but I still felt uncomfortable because I was so immersed in my character. People told me afterwards that they all felt I was a bit off back then because I was so deeply in the zone.”
At his core, fame hasn’t really changed Liu. When asked about this inescapable