Surviving failure, stereotypes, and Bill Murray: The return of Lucy Liu, the star who almost reigned in Hollywood

Lucy Liu’s return to the big screen has caused a stir, but in the best way. Presence is a horror story set in a single location, a family home, and narrated from the point of view of the ghost who occupies it, with whom we, the viewers, silently observe its inhabitants. Directed by Steven Soderbergh, Oscar winner for Traffic (2000) and one of the icons of American independent cinema, the $10 million it has grossed worldwide to date have already more than covered the budget of just $2 million. At its first screening at the Sundance Film Festival a year ago, there were reviews stating that the film was indeed tense, and a handful of viewers walked out of the theater due to “stress.” Even Liu, the matriarch of the fictional family who saw Presence for the first time that night, admitted: “I’m devastated. My body is reacting as if I didn’t make the film.”

Although she’s the most recognizable name in the cast, Liu isn’t the star of her latest release. The American actress, whose parents are of Chinese origin, is slowly regaining her presence on the big screen, if you’ll pardon the redundancy. She recently appeared in Red One (2024), the expensive Christmas vehicle starring Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans. She was also seen in the superhero adventure Shazam! Fury of the Gods (2023), from the DC universe, after having worked for the competition the previous decade on the Marvel series Luke Cage (2016-18). And between this year and 2026, Rosemead is expected to arrive, a drama in which Liu, in addition to playing the lead role, acts as a producer. Award-season fodder, the film has already been shot, after the actress spent five years trying to get the project based on real events off the ground. The film is about a mother with terminal cancer who, before dying, tries to channel her teenage son’s troubling obsession with mass shootings.

It’s not that Liu has returned from a long retirement. The actress, who became a global star at the beginning of the millennium thanks to the two Charlie’s Angels films (2000-03) and the two Kill Bill volumes (2003-04), enjoyed a certain status as an action movie star for a few years, but, after her peak of fame, she decided to return to the calmer waters of long-term employment in television. She has not lacked work, as she herself stated after turning to surrogacy in 2015 to have her first and only child, Rockwell Lloyd Liu, whom she is raising as a single mother: “It just seemed like the right option for me because I was working and I didn’t know when I was going to be able to stop,” she told People in a controversial interview where she equated non-traditional family models with so-called gestational surrogacy.

Liu, after all, is no stranger to television: her breakthrough came with Ally McBeal (1997–2002), where she played, from the second season onwards, one of the show’s most beloved characters, lawyer Ling Woo. That role generated a stir, with some considering it the most important representation of Asian women in American fiction to date, while others saw it as a mere repository of Orientalist stereotypes. Her second major television outing, Elementary (2012–19), received a similarly turbulent reception, as it was a reinvention of the adventures of Sherlock Holmes with Liu playing a female version of the detective’s partner, Watson.

“I think my best work is ahead of me,” the actress declared last January in an interview with The Guardian, on the occasion of the UK release of Presence. There are well-founded reasons for her optimism. After years of avoiding pigeonholing in the limited range of characters that Hollywood offers to non-white actors, the industry to which Liu now returns is different, since the commercial phenomenon of Crazy Rich Asians (2018) showed investors that Asian people also go to the movies, or when Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan won Oscars for Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022).

In that interview with the British outlet, journalist Emine Saner also mentioned the most notorious incident of Liu’s career, when she confronted Bill Murray on the set of the first Charlie’s Angels film, after the comedian questioned her talent. Saner wondered how many actors would have dared to stand up to a bigwig like Murray on the set of their first major film. “Some of what he said was inexcusable and unacceptable, and I wasn’t going to sit back and take it. I stood up for myself and I don’t regret it. There’s no need to belittle others. I wasn’t going to lower myself,” Liu explained years ago about the incident on the Asian Enough podcast.

“[Liu’s characters] are strong, tough women who show no mercy and don’t take any crap, especially from men!” Professor Derek Lu, a master of arts in Asian American studies from the University of California, tells EL PAÍS. His thesis focused on the cultural politics of representation through Liu’s roles in Ally McBeal and Elementary. In the legal drama, the character of Ling Woo served as the exact opposite of the titular heroine, appearing to the music of the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz (1939), and often portrayed as fire-breathing, cold-hearted, and embodying the hypersexuality of Western fantasies projected onto Asian women. A set of traits that since the beginning of the last century have been grouped under the archetype of the dragon lady, a caricature of a powerful, enigmatic, seductive, and treacherous Asian woman.

“Most discourses [in Hollywood] are limited to good representation versus bad representation, a framework that I personally find limiting,” says Lu, who in his thesis refers to the manifestations of the neoliberal imaginary through the myth of the “model minority,” Asians considered respectable for prospering economically in the U.S. through exemplary behavior and hard work. “Both Ling Woo and O-Ren Ishii [Liu’s character in Kill Bill] were dragon ladies — hypersexualized, exoticized, and all that. But what I found fascinating was the way the shows presented different extremes of Asian-American femininity. Ling, in Ally McBeal, is cold, calculating, sexually voracious, and was widely criticized, while Joan Watson, in Elementary, was intelligent but also empathetic, self-sufficient but caring, which was considered good representation. In analyzing their roles, I found that Joan actually championed a regressive gender politics in how she performs emotional labor in her relationship with Sherlock Holmes, while Ling, for all her excesses, manages to elude the respectability politics that dominated the 1990s.”

“People just assume I’ve done martial arts my whole life”

Lu, a self-confessed admirer of the actress, recalls that Liu auditioned for Portia de Rossi’s role in Ally McBeal, that creator David E. Kelly invented her character after falling in love with her, and that Ling Woo, despite being planned as an episodic appearance, ended up becoming part of the regular cast due to the enthusiastic audience reception. He also celebrates the anomaly of Liu being able to access more varied roles once she passed her peak of fame: she was a police officer in Southland (2012), made her romantic comedy debut with Set It Up (2018), and now she’s launching into indie horror with Presence. Soderbergh’s film inspires additional reflection. “After the screening, I listened to an episode of Pop Culture Happy Hour where they criticized [her character] for being reminiscent of the dragon lady, because she was cold and emotionally distant with her daughter. I think that’s perhaps the dilemma (and inherent injustice) that still persists for actors of color: that viewers project certain stereotypes onto them, whether or not they’re present in the narrative.”

In recent years, the actress has also stepped behind the camera several times, directing a handful of episodes of her series and resuming her career as an artist. At 24, she exhibited a collection of photographs and multimedia pieces in a gallery in New York’s SoHo, and since 2006, she has regularly returned to presenting her sculptures, paintings, and installations. She was also a latecomer to martial arts — she trained in eskrima, a Filipino fighting discipline based on weapons combat — which she took up in her twenties, resigned to the fact that, because she was Chinese, she was constantly asked if she knew kung fu. “People just assume I’ve done martial arts my whole life,” Liu remarked in a 2003 interview with The New York Times to promote Kill Bill. “I did nothing my whole life. I ate, hung out and played handball.”

Before her participation in Tarantino’s famous diptych — also a topic of discussion for portraying a Japanese woman with a geisha look — she was a damsel in distress waiting to be rescued by Jackie Chan in Shanghai Noon (2000), appeared briefly in Chicago (2002) and, in her own way, made history with Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever (2002), an unintelligible shooter starring Antonio Banderas and directed by a director with the pseudonym Kaos, which is listed as the worst film of all time on the aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. A member for two decades of the Committee of 100, an association of prominent Chinese Americans working to improve relations between the two countries, Liu has traditionally been very protective over her personal life. A vegetarian since childhood, she has been religiously associated with Kabbalah — she has been seen carrying symbols, attending its New York center, and has been part of the narrative behind its exhibitions — and has also studied Buddhism and Taoism.

On the romantic front, it has not been reported that she has a partner, while in the past she has been rumored to have had an on-and-off relationship with George Clooney, whom she met on the TV series ER (1995), between 2000 and 2006. And the question she has been getting most frequently since last year, on the occasion of the film’s 25th anniversary, is whether she would participate in a hypothetical new sequel to Charlie’s Angels, a very early-2000s artifact that ended with Liu, Drew Barrymore, and Cameron Diaz doing a playback of Blink-182′s All the Small Things. Her responses have ranged from disbelief that such a thing would happen, to leaving the door open to the possibility of the film being made, to openly saying that she wants it to. Bill Murray has not yet been approached.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition