Simu Liu spoke at the People’s Choice Awards in Santa Monica, California on February 18, 2024.
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Marvel’s first Asian superhero star Simu Liu says he hit “rock bottom” before finding his “initiation” as an actor after his career as an accountant failed.
“I probably spent the first 22 years of my life trying to live up to other people’s definitions of success,” he told CNBC’s Samantha Vadas. “In the process of losing my job and hitting rock bottom, but ultimately freeing myself from that idea and letting I can define success on my own terms,” he said.
Liu was born in China and moved to Canada as a child. In 2011, he joined accounting firm Deloitte in Toronto, but lost his job eight months later because he “missed work” as an extra in the action movie “Pacific Rim.” LinkedIn profile. “Experienced an existential crisis that led to enlightenment on one’s own definition of success. Turned into an actor,” Liu’s profile reads.
When he first started out as a “struggling actor,” he would appear in small roles. “I’m auditioning for roles that don’t have names, you know, ‘Desktop One,’ ‘Paramedic Three,’ that’s it for people who look like me,” he told CNBC.
“We’re not the protagonists of our own…story by any means. Fast forward to 2018, you know, movies like ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ come out and really shake up the world,” Liu said. “Crazy Rich Asians” is the first Hollywood film with a predominantly Asian cast since 1993’s “The Joy Luck Club.”
2019, starring Liu As the star of the Marvel movie “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings”, in the same year, “Saturday Night Live” cast its first Asian member, Chinese-American actor Yang Bowen.
Simu Liu plays Shang-Chi in the Marvel movie “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.”
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“We have an Asian… superhero, but we also have, you know, the Asian cast of SNL. We have incredible Asian stand-up comedians, we have, you know, Asian movies like ” Minari” and “Don’t Tell Her” and “Previous Life,” Liu said. The films explore the experience of “growing up between cultures, generations and languages,” he said. In 2023, Liu played the prominent role of “Ken” in the movie “Barbie”, which broke box office records, and in May starred in the movie “Atlas” with Jennifer Lopez.
Recently, Liu has added a new chord: investment. Earlier this year, he became a general partner at Markham Valley Ventures, which invests in Asian American and Pacific Islander startups.
“I graduated with a degree in finance and accounting, and I worked at Deloitte for a short time before I was laid off. But I think, you know, entering this world is… a natural progression in my career,” he told CNBC .
‘Representative of our community’
Liu is an investor and chief content officer at MiLa, a Chinese soup dumpling company founded by Chinese-American entrepreneurs Jennifer Liao and Caleb Wang and headquartered in Seattle.
When he seeks investment, he says, he considers how a business works, its founders and the product itself. “And then… for me to put my name behind it, I thought, you know, I wanted it to be something uplifting or representative of our community,” he told CNBC.
Through MiLa, Liu hopes to encourage people who are less familiar with Asian food to “be more curious and engage with our community,” he said.
Liu called himself “outspoken” about discrimination against Asian Americans. As the child of immigrants, he said he felt he inherited his parents’ “sense of smallness,” which was, “Oh, we don’t want to get in trouble. We just want to… put our heads down and do the work.”
“For the prosperity of our generation and our children and grandchildren, you know, we need to be more outspoken,” Liu said.
“I really like this quote, which is… ‘Be the person you needed to be as a kid.’ I think for me, that person is someone who is confident, opinionated, not afraid to speak up, not afraid to be Someone who shows up apologetically and proudly.
Disclosure: NBCUniversal is the parent company of CNBC and NBC, which airs “Saturday Night Live.”
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