‘The roles on offer were prostitute or takeaway worker’: How Jing Lusi defied racist stereotypes – and became a star

As a teenager, Jing Lusi was something of a wild child. She was smoking and drinking by the time she was 13, frequently ended up in detention at school and even got suspended for smoking on school premises. “I needed to let off steam,” she says. The actor was rebelling against her strict parents but also against the stereotype of east Asians as well-behaved, “dorky” students. Hers was one of the few Chinese immigrant families living in Southampton in the 90s. She just wanted to fit in. “I managed to get through school by adopting this persona of: ‘I’m wild and erratic, don’t pick on me because I’m not submissive.’ It’s kind of stuck,” she says with a laugh.

Lusi has spent her career successfully dodging stereotypes. After a longrunning part in the BBC’s Holby City, she appeared as a detective in the first series of the dark crime drama Gangs of London in 2020, and an MI6 agent in the 2023 spy thriller Heart of Stone. Her most high-profile role to date, though, was as a scheming lawyer – and the ultimate frenemy – in 2018’s Crazy Rich Asians, the trailblazing romcom featuring an all-Asian cast.

Now, Lusi is breaking new ground with ITV’s nerve-jangling thriller Red Eye. It is a significant development: Sandra Oh, a Canadian-American actor of South Korean descent, won acclaim for her role in Killing Eve, but it is still extremely rare for a mainstream British TV series to feature an east Asian lead.

She plays DC Hana Li, a tough, no-nonsense London detective tasked with taking a doctor (Richard Armitage) back to Beijing to face murder charges after he is accused of killing a young woman. When passengers start to die during the fraught plane journey, Hana begins to suspect that all might not be as it seems.

The part struck a chord with Lusi. “Hana struggles with her identity in terms of fitting in, being an immigrant, and having a mixed-race sister and a white stepmum. It’s like: where’s my place in this world?” says the 38-yearold actor, a sunny bundle of energy on the blustery day we meet. “That definitely is how I felt growing up.”

Lusi was born in Shanghai and emigrated to England with her father, a university lecturer, and mother, a teacher, when she was five. Settling into her new life in Southampton was a huge culture shock. “I didn’t speak a word of English. My mum was so paranoid that I would humiliate myself, she taught me two words to go into school with: ‘me toilet’, which isn’t even correct grammar! Five-year-old me wandering around not being able to say anything except ‘me toilet’ … ”

Her parents couldn’t afford to pay for hot school meals, so they made her a packed lunch every day. “They were trying to be English, so they tried to make a sandwich. They didn’t know how, so they got this roll with lettuce and just doused it in ketchup. I was like: ‘What is this?’ I’m used to really good Shanghai cuisine.” Her school only allowed children to play outside if they had finished their lunches. Lusi couldn’t bring herself to eat all of hers so would be kept inside the canteen at lunchtime. “I could see all my friends playing. It felt like a punishment,” she sighs. “Little me went through a lot.”

When she was 10, she discovered acting. A teacher suggested she audition to be part of a children’s choir that would feature in a production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, starring Phillip Schofield, at the Mayflower theatre in Southampton. On stage during the seven-week run – dry ice swirling and the orchestra playing in the pit in front of her – Lusi was struck by a feeling of liberation and joy. “Seeing the smiling faces of the audience, I was like: ‘This is what I want to do with the rest of my life.’”

She tried out a more sensible path first, studying law at University College

London, in-part to appease her parents. But after she graduated, she had to break the news that she had decided to pursue acting instead, and had enrolled herself in classes. “My dad thought it would go away. Even after a long time, he was like: ‘So when are you going to do your master’s?’ I had never really stuck with anything when I was younger, so he thought this was a phase.”

Acting came naturally to her. When she first started having therapy, at the age of 27, Lusi’s therapist told her she was drawn to acting because she had always been pretending about who she was. “That really hit home, because I don’t think I ever [knew] who I was. Our house was so Asian and I would step outside and be British.”

Working on Crazy Rich Asians, alongside co-stars Awkwafina, Constance Wu and Henry Golding, was a transformative experience for Lusi – one that she compares to being in