Lu Han
Lu Han is an actor, born 1990.
Lu Han, often written as Luhan, spent his first years of fame in Exo and its sub-group Exo-M, leaving the group in October 2014. The scale of what he took with him is easy to underestimate: China National Radio ranked him the sixth most popular entertainment star in the country that same year, and by 2017 the Forbes China Celebrity 100 placed him second on earnings, behind only Fan Bingbing. A solo album, Reloaded, followed in 2015.
The screen career he built on that is a useful portrait of what a Chinese pop star's decade looks like. 2015 alone brought the comedy 20 Once Again and the thriller The Witness, and a cameo in 12 Golden Ducks where he plays a character named after himself. Then came the adventure Time Raiders as the tomb-raider Wu Xie, a role in the international co-production The Great Wall as Peng Yong, the war film The Founding of an Army, and the science fiction picture Shanghai Fortress, which reached further than anything else on the list.
Television and variety carry the rest, and in his case they are not a lesser tier. He hosted on the running-man format Keep Running, mentored on the idol competition CHUANG, led the game-adaptation drama Cross Fire as a professional gamer, and starred in the fantasy serial Fighter of the Destiny and the sports romance Sweet Combat. It is a career built for a specific audience and pointed squarely at it.
Movies (8)
TV (7)
Where to start with Lu Han
For a friendly introduction, try 20 Once Again, a broad comedy with real feeling in it and the film that showed he could do more than appear. The Witness from the same year is the better film, a tight thriller that gives him something to play against rather than carry.
For the blockbusters, Time Raiders is the fun one and The Great Wall is the curiosity, an English-language co-production where he is one face among many. Shanghai Fortress is the biggest swing and the least persuasive result, useful mainly as a marker of how far the ambition ran. On television, Cross Fire is the strongest thing he has led, and Keep Running is where the audience that made him actually spends its time.