Lucy Liu Returns to TV With 'Southland' and to Film With 'Detachment'

Lucy Liu was destined for the spotlight, even if it took some time for her to convince herself. Growing up in New York as the daughter of Chinese immigrants, Liu knew from an early age she wanted to be an actor but admits she didn't let the desire be known until much later in life. "I did the school plays, but I was doing background stuff," she explains. Other people saw a spark in Liu; while attending college, she was spotted by a stranger on the subway, à la Lana Turner's supposed discovery at Schwab's Pharmacy. "He came up and said, 'Hey, you've got potential; would you be interested in doing some commercials and acting?' " Liu recalls. "I said no, but he gave me his card. I called him later and said, 'Actually, I'd love to try this.' " She was sent on her first commercial audition ever, which she booked, and promptly got her SAG card.

While attending the University of Michigan, she became more active in the arts and went on an audition for a supporting role in her school's production of "Alice in Wonderland." Instead, she landed the lead. "That's when it really dawned on me that I had never thought about being front and center," she says. "I had always thought of myself as in the back." Liu says that part of this thinking was due to her ethnicity: "Being Asian was always about the idea of being in the back and not the front. Because everything in the front was always Caucasian."

Over the next few years, Liu would go from bit player in film and TV to leading lady in action blockbusters such as "Shanghai Noon" and "Charlie's Angels." She'd make a memorable villain in "Kill Bill: Vol. 1," earn SAG Awards for her work in the "Chicago" and "Ally McBeal" ensembles, and even get a shout-out in an Outkast song. She would become perhaps the most prominent and popular Asian-American female actor in the business, with powerful producers creating roles for her.

Among her fans are John Wells, the producer behind "ER," who invited Liu to join the TNT cop drama "Southland" for its fourth season as Officer Jessica Tang, a part written just for her. "I had the pleasure of working with Lucy during the first seasons of 'ER,' " Wells relates to Back Stage. "She was wonderful in several episodes with George Clooney." Tang is somewhat of a departure for Liu, more vulnerable and sensitive than viewers might be used to seeing her. Tang is returning to the force after a year recovering from a severe beating from a suspect she pulled over. Though steely and strong, she has a few offbeat habits—such as having to eat at a specific place on a certain day—that earn her the ire of some of her fellow officers.



Liu was attracted to the role for several reasons, one being that it was only a one-season commitment. She also embraced the opportunity to work with Wells again. "John called and talked to me about it and said, 'I'd like you to come back and do something that's a little bit more down-to-earth and raw,' " she recalls. " 'Because that's how I knew you when you first started, and you've done all these other amazing roles and interesting characters, but this one's going to be a little more grounded.' I'm always up for a challenge, and I knew whatever he was going to be working on was going to be wonderful." Wells has nothing but praise for Liu and her performance, noting, "Beyond being a remarkably talented actress, Lucy is smart and tough. Cops call it 'command presence'—and Lucy has it."

School Daze

Liu can also be seen in a more gritty milieu, playing an exasperated school psychologist in "Detachment," available on Movies on Demand Feb. 24 and in theaters March 16. The film, which stars Adrien Brody as a substitute teacher at a troubled New York City high school, premiered at last year's Tribeca Film Festival. "The script came to me through my agent, and I thought it was really good," Liu says, adding of the final film, "I think the movie is kind of incredible. Very dark and very hard, not diluted at all."



Liu says she didn't draw on experience for her role in "Detachment" though she went to a public school, she was a good student and went on to earn a bachelor of science degree in Asian languages and cultures at Michigan. After graduation, she returned to New York and broke the news to her parents that she wanted to pursue an acting career. How did they take it? "Not well," Liu says. "Obviously, there was a great deal of concern about how I was going to take care of myself and make a living." Liu adopted a practical approach to her career, taking survival jobs in catering and retail. "I understood that this industry was a business, and you had to have money," she says. "You couldn't just expect to go from one acting gig to another. And in my spare time, I would send out my headshots to all these people and follow up on the phone. I was really winging it in many ways; I had no idea what I was doing."

Liu continued to wing it when she moved to Los Angeles in the early 1990s at the suggestion of an agent. "I had auditioned and screen-tested for pretty much all the New York soap operas already," she says. "So I decided to try L.A., but I didn't know anyone in the business. Someone helped me make up a résumé, and I got headshots taken, but I really had no clue. In a way, that naïveté was a positive thing because I had no idea what I was up against. When you're younger you're more courageous; you don't have the same fears about failing. And nothing is worse than not trying."

One of her earliest jobs was in an AFI short directed by future Oscar nominee Darren Aronofsky ("Pi," "Black Swan"), which she booked through Back Stage. Titled "Protozoa," it was a bizarre, experimental film about three slackers wandering through life. "I just remember the sound guy always telling me they couldn't hear me and I had to speak up," Liu says. "Then when I saw the movie, I was like, 'Why am I screaming through the whole thing?' " As for the plot of the film, Liu is fuzzy on the details. "My character has a grandmother, and I think she ends up exploding into a big green blob. That's what I can remember. Even then, Darren was very creative."

Hospitals to Courtrooms

Small roles in film and TV followed, and Liu cites several casting directors for helping her along the way, including "Southland" CD John Frank Levey, who cast her in the aforementioned arc on "ER." Levey met Liu socially before she came in to read for "ER," and she booked her first audition with him. "Her part had almost no lines; she was a prostitute with AIDS and a baby, and she just did beautifully," Levey recalls. "My sense of Lucy has always been that she is funny, smart, deep, and beautiful. Inside and out."

Another CD Liu credits is the late Marion Dougherty, who cast her in the 1999 thriller "Payback," in which she played a hit woman for the Chinese mafia. "I do think my biggest break, in my mind, was 'Payback,' because it was a great part and I got to work with Mel Gibson and Brian Helgeland," Liu notes. "It was just a straight-up audition through Marion, who was a wonderful, wonderful casting director."

Then came the job that changed Liu's career: the role of sexy and ferocious lawyer Ling Woo on David E. Kelley's quirky dramedy "Ally McBeal." Originally, Liu auditioned for the part of Nelle Porter, which went to Portia de Rossi. "The feedback I got was 'David really likes you, but he's going to give it to someone else. But if he likes you, he'll write for you,' " Liu recalls. "And I was like, 'Yeah, sure.' And not too long after, I got a call saying he had written a part for me." Though it's hard to imagine, Liu hesitated to take the role because she had been offered a play at a regional theater. "It was my manager who told me, 'You have to do this. It's only seven or eight days, but it's really important.' So I said okay. Then it turned into three episodes, then eight, and then I was asked to be a regular."

Roles in "Shanghai Noon" and "Charlie's Angels" followed. The latter was a wonderful but odd experience for Liu, who was caught off-guard by the media scrutiny of the star-studded project. "It's funny—once you get the job, you don't realize that with all of it comes a lot of other craziness," she says. "When you're doing the job, you're just showing up and working. Then you start hearing all these things coming out that you have no idea where they came from. There were rumors we didn't get along or there were problems. It was sort of when I realized, Oh, we're not in Kansas anymore. This is a whole new ballgame."



Liu confesses she has become more gun-shy in interviews as a result of the attention. Asked what is the strangest thing she has ever read about herself, she tells of an article in German GQ that a friend translated for her. "The translation turned out to be that I was this dominatrix but also kowtowing to the interviewer," she recalls. "We went out to Japanese food, and I believe I was pouring the tea, and the writer basically used all these stereotypes to portray me as, like, a geisha. It turned into this distorted article that was all in the imagination of the writer from the different characters I'd played. We were shocked at first, but then we just laughed."

Calling Action

Liu recently completed work on the film "The Man With the Iron Fists" for director RZA (co-founder of the hip-hop group Wu-Tang Clan), in which she stars opposite Russell Crowe. It's a return to the action genre that made her so popular, a development Liu finds ironic. "I never thought I was going to be doing action; it wasn't my forte," she says. "I was not athletic at all; it only started when I did 'Charlie's Angels.' It was such a big movie; it sort of launched the idea of doing action all the time. Which is great because you feel like you've done something right."

Her career in action may have helped to win over her parents. Asked how they feel about her career now, she says, "I think they're happy. I think they feel more settled and more secure about me taking care of myself, even if they don't totally understand what the job is like." Surely they must get excited about Liu working with movie stars? "Not really—they're not a starstruck group of people," she says with a laugh. There was one exception: her "Shanghai Noon" co-star Jackie Chan. "Oh yeah, I think they were excited about that," she says. "They had to admit, that was pretty wonderful."

---

Team Player

Lucy Liu says one key to her career longevity is the people working behind the scenes for her. "I'm so lucky to have a really strong team of people that are looking out for me and advising me, because I wouldn't be able to do it by myself," she notes. Chief among these is her agent turned manager, Maryellen Mulcahy, of Framework Entertainment. "I met her at my first agency, and she left to go somewhere else. I did a guest spot on 'L.A. Law,' and she called me and said, 'You were really wonderful.' I was speaking Chinese the whole time, so she was like, 'I don't know what you were saying, but you really were able to express something really amazing.' And I said thank you; it meant a lot to me that she called me. There was some connection that was made, and I went to her after that, and she started representing me. And I never looked back."

Liu has been with Mulcahy for nearly 20 years and says her manager offers not just great business advice but emotional support. "It's a big job to deal with; I don't know how she does it—actors who are emotionally very changeable. We were really lucky to have the career that we've had and to have the opportunities that we've had together, and I'm lucky to be able to talk to her about anything. And we move on and we fix it, or we get better and we grow. It's probably the longest relationship I've ever had."

Outtakes

Other films include "3 Needles," "Lucky Number Slevin," and "Domino."

She has lent her voice to the "Kung Fu Panda" and "Tinkerbell" movies and episodes of "King of the Hill," "The Simpsons," and "Futurama."

An active artist in collage, painting, and photography, Liu has had her work displayed in shows around the world.