Lucy Liu

Spotlight By: Benjamin Lee BenjaminLee@TheCinemaSource.com

When you take a look at her resume, it seems Lucy Liu is missing a certain vulnerability in her choice of roles. First gaining fame as the vicious Ling on the once popular dramedy Ally Mcbeal, Liu then leapt onto the big screen with a prolific range of roles.

She played the action heroine in Charlie’s Angels, the femme fatale in Cypher, the heartless assassin in Kill Bill: Volume 1, the murderess in Chicago and the dominatrix in Payback. One thing her work isn’t missing is a sense of power. In an industry still dominated by men, Liu has refused to settle into the groove that many of her peers have settled into. No rom-coms as yet.

In her new film however, Liu has gone for something completely different. She stars in 3 Needles, an earnest new drama about the AIDS pandemic. The film is split into three chapters and Liu headlines the first as a black-market blood seller who unwittingly ends up infecting a small village with the virus. It’s a project three years in the making, with writer/director Thom Fitzgerald at the helm.

The film is being released on World AIDS Awareness day and Liu believes it’s an important film for people to see. ‘People will suddenly understand that AIDS and HIV is not something specific to drug addicts or to the gay community’ Liu believes ‘I think it’s much more universal than that and that it’s happening not just to adults but to children. It gives you facts without hitting you over the head’.

Contained in the movie are many highly emotional scenes, especially for Liu. ‘It’s actually amazing because as exhausted as you are emotionally, you feel so light and free afterwards’ Liu states ‘You’ve somehow participated in whatever Thom’s vision is. Thom has a great sense of humor so even if we’re shooting something very dramatic on set he makes sure we’re well taken care of’.

The film

is a labor of love for writer/director Thom Fitzgerald and it’s his passion which helped draw Liu to the project. ‘I think he’s a really remarkable filmmaker and he’s also a really great creative collaborator’ Liu says ‘We collaborated for about a year actually. I would love to work with him as much as I possibly could’.

For the film, native New Yorker Liu spoke in Chinese, opening up a side of her we’ve rarely seen before. ‘There’s just something so romantic about it’ Liu expresses ‘It opens up another bloodline in your body and your soul to be more vulnerable. It just makes the experience that much more personal’.

According to Liu, the reaction she’s been getting from the film has so far been something rather special. ‘I think people are astonished by the rawness and the honesty of it’ Liu believes ‘Thom really didn’t hide a lot of the things people normally would’. One thing which wasn’t hidden was a particularly brutal scene which had Liu’s character giving birth in a cornfield. ‘Seeing a birth scene where someone cuts the umbilical cord off with her teeth. It’s something that’s not even talked about let alone been shown before’.

For Liu, showing such vulnerability is new and makes a radical departure from all of her more self-assured roles prior to the movie. Liu admits it’s something which she takes great pleasure in doing. ‘I think it’s really wonderful to explore all different sorts of characters’ Liu states ‘Even in the women I play that are really powerful I think it’s really important to always inject those characters with a certain femininity and a certain vulnerability so that you can have a balance of both’.

An ambassador for UNICEF, Liu takes her charity work as serious as she does her work in the film industry. When it comes to the controversial area of celebrity adoptions, Liu believes it’s an unnecessary topic to focus on. ‘I think it’s important that

we recognize that there are so many children that need homes or have been orphaned and there’s a very limited amount of people that may be interested in adopting them’ Liu believes ‘I don’t think it should be about whether the person that’s adopted them is a celebrity or not. There’s a lot of people that are trying to adopt and they’re not celebrities’. When it comes to adoption herself, Liu is unsure. ‘I’d never say never to anything’.

Despite being someone who gives off a fiercely independent persona on-screen, Liu believes its teamwork which has helped her to sustain such a consistent career. ‘I have a really strong team of people and they really protect me as much as possible’ Liu states ‘You don’t do it on your own. You have opinions but sometimes you need guidance and I definitely defer to them. They always have the right answers and if we do fumble along the way then we fumble together’.

Next for Liu is Code Name: The Cleaner, a broad comedy with Cedric The Entertainer where she plays an FBI agent, Watching The Detectives with Cillian Murphy where she plays a femme fatale and Rise where she plays a vampire. These choices show that Lucy Liu seems unwilling to conform to Hollywood labels and continues to seek out films which give her an advantage over her male counterparts. But with her passion for chaity work and helping childen, it seems that Liu’s hard image is her greatest performance yet.