Simu Liu

Watch the bus. In Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021), Liu's Shaun is on his way to work when Florian Munteanu's Razor Fist comes for the pendant round his neck, and the fight runs the length of a moving bus, front to back, with the brakes gone. Bill Pope keeps the frame wide, the editors hold each shot, and Liu is plainly doing the work himself. We sat up, and we were surprised by how much pleasure there was in watching a punch land and knowing where it came from. He is a trained body before he is anything else, and in a genre that usually hides its leads behind cuts, that counts.

He studied business, worked as an accountant at Deloitte, and was laid off around 2012; the first screen credit is an uncredited extra in Pacific Rim (2013), followed by stunt work. Then five years as Jung Kim in the Canadian sitcom Kim's Convenience (2016–2021), which is where the ease with a joke comes from. Marvel handed him the title role in Shang-Chi, and he has since turned up as one of the Kens in Barbie (2023) and as the diver David Yuasa in Last Breath (2025), a part he trained underwater for. The habit of preparing hard is the through-line.

The question is what he does when nobody is throwing anything. In Shang-Chi the script gives Shaun nothing to want beyond not being his father, and Liu, likeable and game, does not supply the want himself. Beside Tony Leung he looks like a pleasant actor in a film that has not decided who its lead is, and the film keeps cutting to Jayden Tianyi Zhang as the boy in training because the child has more to do than the man. Some of that is the writing. Some of it is that a sitcom teaches an actor to react, and a lead has to start things.

His subject, when he is given one, is the son who cannot satisfy the parent. He plays that in Kim's Convenience and again in Shang-Chi, and he has said of himself: "I spent the better part of my life trying to live up to my parents' expectations of who I ought to be. And I was bad at it." That is a real thing to bring to a film, and so far only the fight scenes have let him bring it with his whole body.

He is due to play Shang-Chi again. What we would like next time is a script that gives him something to want that is not simply a different father. Until then, watch the bus.