Lucy Liu on Mental Health, Motherhood, and the “Very Limiting” Hyphenate Hollywood Should Retire

On a chilly December evening, the sounds of Lucy Liu’s filmography echoed through an upper Manhattan cineplex. Liu had arrived for a post-screening Q&A in support of her new movie, Rosemead, only to hear dialogue from Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair (a special project that combines parts one and two of Quentin Tarantino’s revenge thriller) emanating from a nearby theater. “I couldn’t believe it. I just happened to walk by, and I heard what sounded like my voice,” Liu tells Vanity Fair. “I walked over and it was that scene.”

You know the one. Liu and Uma Thurman play rival sword-wielding assassins who battle to the former’s death in a snow-covered, blood-soaked blowout. It is one of many impressive moments from Liu’s lengthy career, which has seen her turn a successful late-’90s run on Ally McBeal into a diverse oeuvre of action (two Charlie’s Angels movies, two Kill Bill films), intrigue (seven seasons of the network whodunnit Elementary), and romance (Netflix’s Glen Powell springboard, Set It Up). In 2000 she became the first Asian woman to ever host Saturday Night Live, and nearly two decades later, Liu became only the second Asian American actress to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, following in the footsteps of Chinese American actress Anna May Wong, one of the few Asian performers to break through in Hollywood’s golden age.

Liu in Kill Bill, 2003.© Miramax/Everett Collection.

Liu is one of the most recognizable Asian women in film history, but grows weary when reminded of it. “I would love to get rid of the hyphenates. I would really love to just be an artist. I find it really strange that I have to have a title before my craft. I think it’s very limiting,” she says. “I don’t know that anyone’s saying, ‘This is an Australian actress’ or ‘This is an English-slash-Spanish [actor].’ It’s kind of like if you’ve been attached to somebody, and then you have to carry their last name because you were married to them.”

As Liu, now age 57, explains: “I find it to be very imprisoning. Not for me, but for them. Because I don’t walk around looking at myself and saying it out loud. I’m proud of who I am, but I don’t need to always label myself as something.”

Liu’s recent double feature seems to have paid off: Rosemead generated more than $50,000 in ticket sales from a single venue during that aforementioned weekend, netting one of the biggest per-theater openings of last year. Based on a 2017 Los Angeles Times column by Frank Shyong, the film dramatizes the tragic true story of a single Taiwanese American mother named Irene, who secretly undergoes cancer treatment while navigating her teenage son Joe’s (Lawrence Shou) recent schizophrenia diagnosis. Rosemead, which she also produced, marks a rare dramatic leading role for Liu, who adopted a Mandarin accent and shrunken physical posture to play a terminally ill Irene.

With a screenplay by Marilyn Fu, Rosemead, from first-time director Eric Lin, is a film that lingers. “Most people would not have believed this movie to be true, if it wasn’t based on a true story, because of the ending,” Liu says. “And I can understand why—I wouldn’t want it to be true.”

Liu in Rosemead, 2026.Courtesy of Vertical Films.

With Joe haunted by hallucinations following the death of his father (Orion Lee) and fears of a shooting at his high school, his condition escalates, leading Irene to make a stunning decision about her son’s future. It’s an outcome audiences won’t necessarily endorse, but may grow to at least understand. “I just wanted to humanize not the act, but the person. I don’t think she was a cruel person,” Liu says. “She was a loving person. There’s so much that we don’t know, which goes on behind closed doors. People oftentimes find it hard to talk about, because there’s a sense of shame and there’s a cultural weight of holding this façade up when the reality is quite different. That kind of structure only indicates more hiding. Is there a perfect way forward? No, there isn’t, but there’s a better way forward.”

Those words ring especially true when Liu and I speak days after the shootings at both Brown University and Australia’s Bondi Beach, which occurred the same weekend as the tragic killings of filmmaker Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele, whose son Nick has been charged with their murders. (Nick has not yet entered a plea in the case.) “What’s crucial about the movie is that it’s timely, and it keeps becoming timely, and I would love it to be in the past,” Liu says. “It just keeps surfacing.”

Liu, who is a single mother of a 10-year-old, came to some familial realizations of her own during Rosemead’s decade-long development. “Becoming a parent does change you in a deep way, but I did not relate Irene to myself as a parent…. I did not think about my son when I was doing this…because my son is much more modern and American [than Joe and Irene], as I am,” Liu says. “[But] it gave me much more compassion for my parents”—her scientist mother and civil engineer father, who were born in China, met in New York, and initially balked at Liu’s chosen career. After Rosemead, “I could see them as a younger person in the world, trying to find their way in America.”

The transformative project is one of many, perhaps less harrowing films about families in the Asian community that Liu hopes to make. And she isn’t deterred by the prospect of emerging AI or a potentially catastrophic studio merger that could complicate getting such movies into packed theaters. “It’s always been a bit of an uphill battle,” Liu says, “but I do think that I have a little bit more insight about how difficult it is to get stories like ours told. I don’t find that to be a disappointment as much as a challenge, and I’m game for that.”

Liu in Charlie's Angels, 2000.© Columbia Pictures/Everett Collection.

As she approaches the next chapter of her career, is there anything Liu wishes she’d known 34 years ago, back when she earned her first IMDb credit with a 1991 episode of Beverly Hills, 90210? “It’s just making me laugh so hard right now, thinking about it. I didn’t know anything about the camera back then, and I was totally clueless,” Liu says with a laugh. “If I had known all the things that I know now, I think I would have stopped. I’m so glad that I was so innocent and clear of any history of what I was going to walk into. The gift was really knowing absolutely nothing.”

Next up, Liu will play a top-secret role in the Devil Wears Prada sequel, lead the Peacock series Superfakes—which the Safdies and A24 are producing—and star in Lulu Wang’s upcoming film opposite Charles Melton, with backing from the Obamas to boot. It feels a bit like a rebirth for Liu. “I don’t know anything, and it’s actually really freeing,” she says. “It makes me feel more alive than I did when I was somewhere in the middle, where some people would think, Oh, that’s really the height [of a career], but it really wasn’t the height; it’s just part of it…. I’ve always known that my best work is ahead of me, and I still feel that way.”