Bai Baihe plays the one person on screen who declines to be surprised. In Monster Hunt that steadiness is the joke and it works; in the dramas that followed it has too often been handed thin parts, and steadiness alone cannot fill them.
Fi1m perspective
The best moment we have seen her in is a birth. In Monster Hunt (2015), a man is giving birth to a radish-shaped creature, Jing Boran is wailing on his back, and Bai Baihe's Xiaolan gets on with the delivery as if it were a job with a deadline. She does not pull a face at the creature. She does not pull a face at him. Raman Hui and his editor Cheung Ka-Fai keep the cuts on the actors rather than the effect, and what the scene needs is one person in it who is not reacting, and that is her. We laughed harder than the film deserved, and most of the laugh was hers, because she was the only one treating the nonsense as work.
That refusal to be impressed is the whole act, and it has served her in and out of comedy. She came up through television from 2006 and broke through in film with Love Is Not Blind (2011), a small romantic comedy that made her the everyday young woman of mainland cinema for the next few years. The busy stretch followed: Personal Tailor (2013) for Feng Xiaogang, The Stolen Years (2013), then in 2015 both Monster Hunt and Go Away Mr. Tumor, an inspirational comedy-drama where the humour had to sit next to something harder. After that she went looking for something else: a caper in Chongqing Hot Pot (2016), a thriller in The Missing (2017) for Xu Jinglei, a second go at Xiaolan in 2018, and more recently television such as Sunshine by My Side (2023). She has said she dislikes the word for any of this: "I don't agree with the use of the word 'transition', because it is natural for actors to try other things."
What she can do is keep a part that was written shrill or childish on the ground, and critics have noticed. What she cannot do is make a thin character interesting by presence alone, and the complaint in later years has been that she is handed the same stubborn young woman again and again, with A City Called Macau (2019) the point where the result was found hard to like. The timing survives; the parts do not always give it anything to time.
Click through to Monster Hunt and watch the first hour, which is where the film and she are both at their best. The second hour loses its own rules, and Xiaolan is left standing in the middle of it, still unsurprised, still waiting for someone to give her something to do. That has been the shape of too much of her career since. She is better than the steadiness she is asked to supply, and the director who works that out will get a good film from her.
Biography
Bai Baihe is a Chinese actress. She trained at the Beijing Dance Academy from the age of twelve and later at the Central Academy of Drama, graduating in 2006.
She gained prominence with her leading role in the romantic comedy Love Is Not Blind (2011). Bai is known for her performances in Personal Tailor (2013), The Stolen Years (2013), Go Away Mr. Tumor (2015), Monster Hunt (2015) as Huo Xiaolan, Chongqing Hot Pot (2016), and the sequel Monster Hunt 2 (2018). She has also appeared in television series including Surgeons (2017).
Bai was married to actor and singer Chen Yufan from 2006 until their divorce in 2015. She has received awards including the Hundred Flowers Award for Best Actress.
