When Kitao Sakurai, the Japanese-American director of a new film adaptation of the Street Fighter video game franchise, called to say she had the role, Callina Liang reacted the way anyone might expect. “I was in a park screaming at the top of my lungs,” the 26-year-old actress reveals with a giggle over Zoom.
Starring Andrew Koji (Warrior) as Ryu and Noah Centineo (Black Adam) as Ken, the film allows Liang to live out her 16-bit dreams, playing Chun-Li, the franchise’s first-ever female playable character and a real fan favourite.
The casting represents a full-circle moment. Growing up in Beijing, Liang spent her free time playing Street Fighter at a local arcade in Chaoyang. “My grandma would take me there, and this was always the game I gravitated towards,” she said.
For an actress with an innate fighting spirit, it is no surprise she was drawn to this classic title. “I’m a huge gamer now, and I’m a big fan of fighting games,” she said. “And I always say Street Fighter was the game that got me into my love for gaming.”
First published in 1987 by Japanese developer Capcom, Street Fighter is the mother of all martial arts video games, as players take on the characters of Ryu, Ken and many others, fighting each other or a rogues’ gallery of computer-controlled characters.
Not even the much-maligned 1994 movie adaptation – starring Jean-Claude Van Damme as William Guile and Kylie Minogue as Cammy White – could dent the game franchise’s popularity, with more than 60 million copies sold.
Liang herself has “kept playing the game” right up to the 2023 iteration, Street Fighter 6. “I have it downloaded on my PS5,” she said.
BECOMING CHUN-LI
With the role secured, she soon began working with a trainer in Toronto, Canada, where she lives – a two-and-a-half-month sprint to hone her martial arts skills. For two hours in the morning and two in the afternoon, she was lifting weights at the gym and eating a meal every couple of hours (including 12 eggs a day).
“I managed to put on about 20 pounds (9kg) in a month and a half,” she said. “So it was a crazy process for sure, but it was also very therapeutic. I really enjoyed getting all my anger out, learning how to fight and to kick. Now I keep it up. I can’t stop. It’s addictive, and it’s a form of therapy.”
After training ended, she moved to Sydney, Australia, for the “extremely physical” shoot. “When you’re doing a film like Street Fighter, almost all you’re doing is fighting,” she said.
But while the story might be secondary to the smackdowns, she could not dismiss the fact that Chun-Li is fuelled by revenge against antagonist M Bison (played by David Dastmalchian), who killed her father.
Liang made sure she dived into the spin-off manga and anime versions. “I definitely wanted to bring my own take on the character, while also at the same time honouring her storyline and who she is in the games,” she said.
STRIKING SIMILARITIES
Intriguingly, Liang did find parallels between Chun-Li and her own life. Some of them are silly coincidences.
“She’s quick to anger sometimes. When I’m really hungry, I get ‘hangry’ really easily,” she chuckled. Liang also shares some vital statistics with the character – same height (169cm), same blood type (A). “And when you look at her likes and dislikes in the video games, her likes are desserts, fruit and candy, and I’m like, ‘Oh, that is also 100 per cent me.’”
Other comparisons are more serious. “She doesn’t really have any family members other than her father … and me too,” she says. “I don’t have any siblings, and I only have my dad. So growing up it was just me and my dad and no one else.
“She’s also pretty stubborn, very headstrong, very determined,” she added. “If she wants something, she’s gonna get it done. So I also related to her in that way … and as a woman, just navigating in this world by yourself. I moved away from my family at a pretty young age. I was in boarding school from the age of five.”
Liang’s global upbringing has clearly shaped her. Canadian by birth – she was born in Vancouver but was there for a matter of weeks before her family headed to Beijing – she moved to Sydney in 2010, partly for her father’s work in real estate and partly to learn English.
Four years later, she shipped out to Singapore, where the acting bug really kicked in. She first attended Australian International School before going to LASALLE College of the Arts to study Performance. When she dropped out of high school to study drama, her father gave her four years to make it work – or return to education for a career in medical research.
FIGHTING FOR REPRESENTATION
After moving to New York in 2019 to further her acting studies, Liang has more than proved herself to her father. She has already worked with Steven Soderbergh in his highly effective 2024 ghost chiller Presence, opposite Lucy Liu, and the high school drama Bad Genius (also 2024), alongside Benedict Wong.
Liang counts both Liu and Wong as mentors. “Not only were they such great actors who were so honed in on their craft, they also showed me that there is a place for us in this [Hollywood] world that isn’t predominantly for Asian people, so they inspired me truly,” she said.
The journey has not been without its struggles. “I’m very grateful to have gotten the opportunities that I have,” Liang said, “but it didn’t come easily.
“Again, you gotta find jobs that are open to casting an ethnicity without … being so specific to it. There are a lot of stereotypical roles sometimes. It’s gotten better, but I think there’s definitely still room for improvement. It’s not been easy, but I think it’s definitely a lot easier than what actors from the previous generation had to deal with – actors like Lucy and Benedict.
“I’m grateful, but I’m still fighting for more,” she added.
Given her fluent Mandarin, Liang is open to working in Chinese cinema, despite noticing stylistic differences.
“My family really wants me to go into the Chinese cinema world of it all,” she said. “But personally, there isn’t a huge pool for me. I just find the acting styles to be pretty different – the Western world versus the one in China. But if I ever get the opportunity to, I definitely wouldn’t turn it down.
“It would be a dream of mine to use my first language in a film, doing what I love … that would mean a lot to me. And I actually speak some Chinese in Street Fighter, which is cool.”
Liang flies back to Beijing two or three times a year. “My grandma still lives there, so I try and see her as much as I can,” she said. “Whenever I’m not working, I go back to China, and I spend time there because she’s getting old.”
There is a nostalgia, she admits, to returning to her childhood home, even if so much has changed. “The arcade doesn’t exist any more,” she sighed. “Even the supermarket we used to go to doesn’t exist any more.”
No doubt the next time she returns, there will be another change: her own fame. Gamers demanding selfies with the new Chun-Li will probably be the next challenge.
Street Fighter opens in cinemas Oct 15. This article was first published on SCMP.
Source: South China Morning Post/mm