Zhou Dongyu: Forever Young

On November 26, 2016, 24-year-old Chinese actress Zhou Dongyu won the 53rd Taiwan Golden Horse Award for Best Actress for her rebellious and erratic performance in Soul Mate. She shared the award with her costar Ma Sichun, who played the other lead in the film, marking the first time in the history of the Golden Horse Awards, the equivalent of the Oscars for Mandarinlanguage cinema, that the annual honor has been bestowed on two different actresses.

Soul Mate is a romantic drama about two best friends reaching adulthood. Because of the changes brought on by maturity, the two girls’ friendship is tested and their lives veer away from each other. Many critics have opined that the young Zhou was lucky to win on her first nomination, but that her portrayal of the impulsive and contradictory Ansheng captured audiences’ attention and connected with them emotionally as the character’s mood shifted.

A Lucky Start

Zhou was born into an ordinary family in Shijiazhuang City, Hebei Province in early 1992. Before turning 18, her life was like that of most her peers in China: dominated by commuting between home and school. In 2010, Zhang Yimou, arguably the best-known and most internationally recognized Chinese director working today, chose Zhou from more than 8,000 actresses to star in Under the Hawthorn Tree. Although Zhou was a senior high school student without any acting experience, the veteran filmmaker sensed her potential.

Her sentimental yet vivid portrayal of the heroine in Under the Hawthorn Tree prompted rave reviews by critics and spectators alike, and Zhou soon became known to the people of her hometown after winning Best Actress at the 56th Valladolid International Film Festival in Spain, the Outstanding New Actress Award at the 14th China Huabiao Awards and Best New Performer at the 20th Shanghai Film Critics Association Awards for her role in Under the Hawthorn Tree.

The luck of the emerging actress continued from there. In 2011, she was admitted to the Beijing Film Academy (BFA), China’s most respected film school, which has produced plentiful artists and filmmakers that now form the backbone of the country’s film industry. While the school’s admission process is one of the toughest and its admission rate one of the lowest in the country, Zhou managed to get in. “Zhou applied for the acting major, but the entrance exam covered both acting and academic subjects,” noted BFA President Zhang Huijun. “Although her academic scores were not as good as her acting scores, we admitted her due to her obvious gift for acting.”

Changing the Stereotype

For a long time, Zhou’s “fortunate” and “smooth” start in the film industry played a large role in discussions about her. She has inspired high expectations from both fans and colleagues because almost every actress discovered by Zhang Yimou shoots to fame. Today, the most internationally-famous former Zhang protégés include Gong Li and Zhang Ziyi, who starred in Farewell My Concubine and Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, respectively.

Although Zhou seems on track to follow her predecessors’ paths to stardom, she’s a little different. In the three years after she was admitted to the BFA, Zhou received a number of film offers and starred in several, but the characters always seemed the same. “I’m always that innocent girl with a fair complexion and black hair—the first-love type,” she once lamented.

She felt the need to break out of the pigeonhole. In 2013, Zhou auditioned for a small role in Breakup Buddies, a road movie which later became the highestgrossing 2014 domestic Chinese film.Directed by young director Ning Hao and starring two of China’s biggest comedy names, Xu Zheng and Huang Bo, the film had already attracted a strong cast. “Actually, the director turned me down at first,” recalled Zhou. “But days later, he called me in for an audition. ‘I have to land this role’ was all I could think on the way to the audition. It was the perfect opportunity to change my image.” During her audition, Zhou was asked to do some name-calling in a local dialect. “I tried my best, but I couldn’t tell if they were satisfied with my performance from their expressions,” she revealed. Two days later, she was notified that she had been cast as a trashy rural hairdresser, turning her previous lovable, innocent image upside down and resulting in the most memorable female character in the film.

After Breakup Buddies, Zhou began to receive a wider variety of offers, and she ended up playing an ill-tempered genius in The Ark of Mr. Chow and an undercover agent in the spy TV drama Sparrow. “I still need to further hone my skills by playing different characters,” says the 24-year-old. “By doing this, I get a deeper understanding of a wider variety of people I might not have otherwise ever known. As an actress, if I don’t deconstruct myself via contrasting roles and changes in environment, I am afraid that my art will lose vitality.”

Millennial Chinese Actress

Throughout history, the cinema of the Chinese mainland has never lacked iconic actresses, and their star personas have embodied both the fantasies and frustrations of the public. Today, a lot of focus is placed on the “Four Dan Actresses,” a term originally coined in the 1920s to refer to popular male actors portraying female roles, now used to describe the most promising young Chinese actresses. The latest list of the “post- 90s” generation of Four Dan Actresses includes Zhou Dongyu, Yang Zi, Zheng Shuang, and Guan Xiaotong, based on a 2016 survey of more than 170 million netizens and 110 professional media and industry insiders.

Although the growth rate of China’s box office slowed in 2016 (still totaling an impressive figure of nearly US$7.2 billion), the country’s film industry has been developing rapidly in recent years. And the tastes of Chinese spectators have become more varied, with romances, comedies, action thrillers, science fiction and fantasy films all finding demanding sectors of the market. The film industry has created a handful of golden opportunities for Chinese actors and actresses, especially young ones.

“We were born at a good time for this industry, and I’ve found many opportunities as a millennial,” remarks Zhou. “However, it is still a little early to talk so much about goals. Young actors and actresses need a good script to reach the audience.”

Zhou now sees her trade as a service to the audience rather than a self-satisfying art. As an actress, Zhou is not yet as wellrounded as she would like to become. But youth is her treasure. “I seldom worry about finding my next job, and I don’t really have the burdens of superstars,” she smiles. “I don’t think I’ve reached that level. Preparing myself to play a lot of different roles is still my priority.”