Simu Liu

You know, the squeaky wheel gets the oil, and my parents had spent a lifetime not making any noise, and I was like, what happens if I do this? What happens if I rock this? What then, you know? Will anybody listen?

What I'm trying to say is, I'm really happy I'm not a doctor. So, take that mom and dad.

I feel like it's a bit of a misconception that all actors have to be expert martial artists if they're Asian.

Was I a Jackie Chan-level martial arts master? Absolutely not! Not by any stretch of the imagination. I'm an actor. I'm a performer.

I definitely dabbled and had done a number of stunt jobs in which I was doing fighting.

In my entire life, I'd wondered why there were no superheroes out there that looked like me.

I'd just woken up from a nap, it was around 6:30 in the evening. I was eating some shrimp crackers at my desk. Then I get a call from an unknown number in Burbank, California and my heart immediately skips a beat because I know the Disney home office is in Burbank.

I was 22 years old, actually, incidentally had just been laid off from my job and I had a dog. My parents just didn't understand any of it.

I've had dogs in my life pretty much from the moment I've been on my own.

I loved Spider-Man, Superman, Batman, but I was always keenly aware that people who looked like me could not look like that.

I loved superhero movies growing up.

Kids growing up today will have what I never did growing up, which is somebody across that screen reflecting who they are, and showing them what is possible.

I think so often we have these ambitions or these hopes within us that we kill before we ever let it escape our lips because we are afraid.

It's important that we meet any sort of hate and negativity with joy and celebration.

My parents came to this country with literally nothing.

The first set I ended up on was Guillermo del Toro's 'Pacific Rim' that was shooting in Toronto and they needed a bunch of Asian extras, and for some reason they put their ad on Craigslist.

Things like 'following your passion' and 'finding your creative outlets' didn't mean anything to me because I didn't have that area of my brain.

Yeah, I went to business school and I actually worked as an accountant for about eight months. It's not what I wanted, but it was definitely a move to appease the parents.

I would do background and extra stuff, I would do student films, I just found every opportunity I could to be on set, and after awhile I accumulated enough work to get an agent.

I might be tweeting a lot of things in the future, some of which will be absolute idiocy.

All around me, I saw people who were taught by their parents, as I was, to just toe the line, not ruffle the feathers, not rock the boat too much and just put your head down, do your work and that's it. And I think that as a community, we're reaching the limitations of that kind of thinking.

If it's true that I wouldn't have had a career if it weren't for these conversations about diversity, the importance of representation, then I need to continue to fight that battle for the people that come after me.

To fully understand the roots of anti-Asian prejudice in America, you need to know about the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 that banned all immigration from China, even though it was Chinese immigrants that had essentially built America's railroad system.

The truth is that Asian people have been targeted and discriminated against for far, far longer than COVID has been around.

I've seen cashiers, servers, transit operators, bank tellers and customs officers speak much too quickly on purpose as if it pained them to have to spend another second of their lives conversing with my parents.

It does feel like we get to just carte blanche create a superhero origin story for 2021, for this day and age, that is told through a distinctly Asian American lens.

I tend to spend way more time than I should on social media.

Not every director can always rise to the challenge of all of a sudden having $200 million thrown at them.

Being a Marvel superhero has always been a dream of mine. And so I think every choice that I made in my career, every step that I took, brought me to that point.

I believe in the cultural significance of the Marvel Universe and 'Kim's Convenience.' They are two weapons in the same fight and they mean everything to me and the possibilities of what they can represent.

Who you seen on screen shapes who you are.

Asian men specifically have not been portrayed as the leading man or sex symbol.

It's every immigrant child's dream to tell your parents they don't have to work anymore.

I think it is so important to have voices in the decision-making process that are sensitive to the groups that your show or your production represents. In the case of 'Kim's Convenience,' that was Korean Canadians, that was East Asian Canadians, and we rightly felt like we didn't have that voice in the writers' room or at the creators' table.

All I really knew how to do was put one foot in front of the other.

I would never in a million years have expected my life to have unfolded the way it did.

I'm somebody who feels caught between two worlds a lot of the time.

We've seen a million versions of the Peter Parker radioactive-spider origin story. We've seen Thomas and Martha Wayne at the opera... over and over again in movies and media, and I think we're ready for something new.

We didn't grow up in any sort of meaningful representation in media apart from, you know, Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Bruce Lee. But, of course, that was different still, because it always played to this narrative of the foreigner from the East.

Because I think it's so easy to look at someone, regardless of where they grew up, where they came from, the language that they speak, to just look at the colour of their skin and all of a sudden reduce them to harmful stereotypes.

And so it became a priority for me to make sure that all Asian Canadians or Asian Americans or wherever you are, Asian Australians, felt like they belonged.

I had very little time to mentally prepare before I was just kind of thrust into it. And I'm watching all of these movie stars that I idolized sharing the stage with me. And then I'm having dinner with Angelina Jolie because that's how the seating chart worked over at Marvel - and then trying to reconcile all of this in my brain.

Shrimp crackers are actually exactly what I was eating when I got the call that I was going to play Shang-Chi.

Shang-Chi can definitely throw a punch.

The first time I tried on Shang-Chi's superhero suit - Marvel has never had an Asian lead, so that was such a rare and impactful moment, for me as an actor but also for people who look like me. I nearly cried. It was so emotional.

I kind of love being a superhero.

Of course, we know Shang-Chi is the, in the comics or in the world of Marvel, he is the master of Kung Fu. He is the greatest hand-to-hand fighter in the universe, and so we had to really bring it and I feel like we did it a really big way.

If I were to fight one Marvel superhero, I think I would fight Captain America. We would start all aggressive and then both realise how much we liked and respected one another. We would be friends.

I went through an evolutionary process of learning to have a voice and how to use it, knowing when to step in. I don't always get it right, for sure. However, it's better to speak your mind than hold your tongue and wish you had said something.

I have always prided myself on being able to speak my mind.