Most of Poppy Liu‘s career has been spent dedicated to experimental warehouse theater (“very, very off-off-Broadway,” in her words) and grassroots indie films. The actress, who grew up in Minnesota and China, spent her 20s putting on productions about such topics as her own abortion story and a friend’s experience as a professional dominatrix sex worker. And then there was the naked play. “The thought of it now makes me want to break out in hives, but at the time I thought it was so empowering,” says Liu. “It was like: This is my body and we’re going to make you look at it and not sexualize it, and we’re going to tell this heart-wrenching story. While we’re naked.”
Now Liu is in the middle of a second act, as it were, as a comedic darling whose face is all over the major networks. She broke big on Hacks, playing a crackerjack private blackjack dealer and longtime friend of Jean Smart’s Deborah Vance.
Liu first signed with a manager and moved to Los Angeles in 2018, and by the following year she had her first role, a series regular on Sunnyside, a sitcom that NBC pulled from the airwaves before it had a chance to take off. (Liu notes that, although the show has been seemingly scrubbed from the internet, a particularly enterprising fan made a YouTube compilation of her and Joel Kim Booster’s scenes.) But Liu felt a sea change almost immediately when Hacks hit Max.
“It feels like everything happened so fast. I was in New York losing money — I had to work two other jobs just to pay for the naked play — and now I’ve been getting so much work that I felt burnout,” she says. “I live in L.A. now, I have a child, I’m raising chickens. I’m here!”
Some of the calls that came in after Hacks started gaining the industry’s attention: Dead Ringers, on which Liu plays the nefarious house manager to Rachel Weisz’s gynecologist twins; The Afterparty, which Liu joined for its second season on Apple TV+; and this summer’s wacky comedy Space Cadet. She also experienced a career first when esteemed showrunner Liz Feldman (Dead to Me) sent over the script for her next Netflix dramedy and requested a meeting. Feldman was casting for the real estate-centric murder mystery No Good Deed — about a group of Angelenos all vying to buy a Los Feliz mansion — and liked Liu to play opposite Abbi Jacobson, who already was set as one half of a couple struggling through IVF. “When there’s a filmmaker who says, ‘I’m picturing you and you’re the right fit for this puzzle,’ that feels really good,” Liu says.
The role offers a huge amount of exposure for the still-burgeoning (in some circles) actress, but she says she also savored the opportunity to work with another comedy icon in Lisa Kudrow, who, alongside Ray Romano, plays the owner of the house in question. “I had one scene alone with Lisa, and I rarely get starstuck, but when I first met her, I was just, like, heart eyes. I think all I could say was, ‘Thank you,’ and she just said, ‘You’re welcome,’ ” she recalls with a laugh. “I was like, all right, that went well.”
In contrast to the peaks of her career, Liu also has experienced some of the valleys of the business. She was an early and vocal opponent of Israel’s war in Gaza and says she felt the industry start to turn on her and her fellow activists. In May, she says she had a job offer (what would have been a six-year series contract) rescinded, with no explanation. “I think with time, the firing has been more covert,” she says. “I know a number of friends who have been dropped by agents because they’ve been outspoken. And the agent who represents the person who dropped me from the show also dropped other friends of mine.”
Throughout the ordeal, Liu says she became even more committed to speaking out — she uses her Instagram account to boost voices from within Palestine — and that she also found creative connections within the activist community. She’s conducting this Zoom interview from her car, fresh from a lunch of conveyer belt sushi with Boots Riley; the two are in Atlanta shooting his next film alongside Eiza González, Taylour Paige and Will Poulter. “The first appointment I got after I lost that job was for Boots’ new movie, and I was like, ‘OK, even if I don’t book this, it’s a sign that the right people are out there,” she says. “And that I should never compromise my values as an artist. What is our role if not to reflect the world back? ”
She’s also decided to return to her avant-garde roots by developing a series with two of her best friends about a Chinese American sex worker. “I don’t need things to be weird or edgy,” she notes. “I just crave the creative process and making stuff with my friends.” Most importantly, she’s trying hard to stay attached to the right things — and not get attached, at all, to the wrong things — as her career accelerates.
“I think a lot of people who work in this industry think this is the whole world, and that the world is ending if you don’t get a job,” she says. “But I try to remember that there is a whole world outside of this business, and it only works if we’re connected to that. Even if one day I no longer have a place in this industry, it’s not going to stop me from being a storyteller in some way.”
This story appeared in the Dec. 4 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
Source: Hollywoodreporter
