Boredom is not a feeling with which Lucy Liu is familiar. “Sometimes I wouldn’t mind it,” she says with a smile. “But it feels nonstop. I never get bored because I don’t have time.” If there wasn’t so much to do, she says: “I’m sure I could learn a language, you know, learn how to ride a unicycle. I mean, come on, the list is endless. So it never feels, like ‘What’s left?’ It’s ‘Where do we start?’” Liu is not someone who likes to look backwards. “I think my best work is ahead of me,” says the actor who has done blockbusters (2000’s Charlie’s Angels and its sequel), two Quentin Tarantino movies (Kill Bill Vols 1 & 2), performed on Broadway, shared top billing on a hit TV show (Sherlock Holmes update Elementary, playing a female Watson), all after receiving her big break on another, era-defining series (Ally McBeal).
Liu’s latest film is Presence, one of Steven Soderbergh’s more experimental works. Although nominally a horror, it’s weirder than that, being shot from the perspective of a ghost who watches a new family move into a house. “He’s truly an artist, because he’s willing to experiment and not really afraid to fail,” says Liu of the director. She has been a fan of Soderbergh’s since his 1989 breakthrough Sex, Lies, and Videotape. “I feel like it [Presence] is coming from a very clear place of curiosity, which I enjoy, because that is artistic freedom, isn’t it? You’re not doing it for ‘the Man’. It’s something you are curious about so then you just try it. It’s almost childlike.” The film has little dialogue, and little backstory. Liu’s character is the mother of two teenagers, and there is clearly tension within the family, not least because she seems to favour her son over her daughter. Sometimes there are scenes, in the ghost’s watchful presence, where nothing appears to happen, which feels a little destabilising to a modern audience used to fast cuts and spoon-fed exposition. “We’re so used to being told what to look at, what to do or feel,” says Liu.
Soderbergh shot the film himself on a handheld camera, wearing karate slippers to creep around as silently as he could. As the “presence”, it felt as if he was part of the cast. “He would say after a take: ‘I can do better,’ knowing that he didn’t get what he needed. I find that to be really refreshing,” says Liu. When people have been as successful as Soderbergh, she continues: “I don’t think they want to show themselves to be porous that way, because maybe they have to hold up that acclaim. It gives you a sense of connection in a very intimate way, because he’s willing to say something like that out loud. It makes you feel softer, because it’s very possible to make an error, to step in the wrong place or block somebody. So when he says something like that, it’s like, we’re all here together, and there’s no shaming.”
We are speaking over Zoom; Liu is in her office in New York, her rescue dog jumping up on her lap. As a child, born in New York to Chinese parents, Liu heard about someone her own age she knew who had filmed a commercial. It sounded exciting. “Television was really a form of escape and I think I wanted to just get out of wherever I was.” She would watch sitcoms such as The Brady Bunch, “those things that seemed so shiny, and how wonderful would it be to be so shiny?” She didn’t feel shiny? She laughs. “I was not shiny. I think coming from a place where you didn’t really fit in, culturally, visually, it was difficult to imagine being away from that. Or shiny.”
Liu didn’t see Asian Americans on screen. “I internalised probably a lot more than I realised,” she says. “Almost to the point where you accept: ‘Oh, this is what it is.’ Nobody’s saying: ‘You can do that.’” But something inside her told her she could do it,” she says. “And as soon as I could, I did, and against all odds at that time.”
She circled auditions in the newspaper and hit the pavements. She says she was so sure of what she was doing, even though it seemed as if she was experiencing “infinite failures – and I was OK with that”. She was often, she says, “the only diverse person in the room: it was so obvious. I would think often, even if I didn’t get the job, they would understand that I had something different that could be used for something else down the line. I don’t know, I was so excited and it’s not different from how I feel now, because I have such a passion for what I do. I think if I didn’t feel this way, I would stop doing it, because it is difficult, no matter what stage you’re at in your career.”
Why is it difficult, even when you’re successful? “Because there are challenges that you’re going to be faced with as a woman, and obviously there’s more diversity now, but there still isn’t enough. I think that when you do something well, people want you to continue doing that, so the struggle is doing something well, but also not being sequestered in that direction only.”
She managed to navigate the entertainment business in the 90s, a period of notorious danger for young female actors. She was, she says, “aware that some situations were not safe, and not to get involved in that. I think having that sense of self saved me from a lot of probably bad situations of either being taken advantage of, or what people would think is quid pro quo.” When you’re younger, she says, it is particularly difficult to tell the difference between “‘Oh, this person really likes me,’ and ‘This is not good. This is not what you think it is. This is not a relationship.’ Everyone has an instinct, and I don’t know that everyone listens to it, but that’s one thing that I’ve always been able to channel and connect with.”
Liu’s uncompromising style was very much in evidence during the filming of Charlie’s Angels, in which she played one of three agents alongside Cameron Diaz and Drew Barrymore, briefed by an assistant, played by Bill Murray, under the instruction of the mysterious Charlie. Liu and Murray clashed on set. She said he used language that “was inexcusable and unacceptable” and pulled him up on it. I wonder if many actors appearing in their first big blockbuster – and, as Liu was then, the least established of the leads – would have been brave enough to do that (in recent years, Murray has faced more allegations about his behaviour on set). Why did she speak out? “I really didn’t think about it. I would have done that in any situation. I think when I sense something is not right, I am going to protect myself. It’s an innate thing to do if you feel there’s injustice, and I always feel that way.”
She says she couldn’t be the sort of person who keeps quiet, plays the game. “If I was, it would have been a much easier road. But because I’ve never been that person, we had to find a way. I think there has never been an easy road, for me and for us – and I say ‘us’, because I really think it’s a group effort.” The “us” she refers to are all the Asian American actors who came before her. “I would never take credit. My career has not been paved by myself.”
She is not complacent either. Diversity on screen and behind the scenes may have improved (“somewhat – not a lot”), but the rise of anti-Asian hate crime during the pandemic brought fear and despair. As for a second Trump presidency: “It’s complicated, and I’m quite miffed by the whole thing. That’s a very light word, by the way. I think there’s going to be generational damage, and I think in the world as a whole, there’s a lot of division and fear, and I think fear fuels extreme choices.” There is, she believes, “a backwardness to what’s happening; it’s going to only get worse, I believe, if we don’t really educate and understand one another.”
Liu says she never had a career path, and she has created the kind of life she wanted: New York rather than Hollywood; single motherhood (she had her son in 2015, with the help of a surrogate); and juggling her acting career alongside work as a visual artist. “I guess it can look like it’s not a traditional life or family environment, but I made decisions based on how I felt. And that’s what works for me.” Did she feel pressure to maintain a commercial career after the early 2000s success of Charlie’s Angels and the Kill Bill films? “No,” she says. “I’m interested in working with people that I like, and I think that’s happened more and more.” Being an Asian American actor, she adds, has “never been an incoming-call business. Sometimes it has been, but it’s very rare, so it’s still a journey where you have to look at the project, see what makes sense.” She smiles. “And also: ‘Is this going to be fun?’”
• Presence is released in UK cinemas on 24 January, and Australian cinemas on 9 February.
