Ryan Zheng Kai

Two careers run in parallel here, and only one of them is acting. Zheng graduated from the Shanghai Theatre Academy in 2008, signed with Huayi Brothers, and made his name in films first: So Young, My Lucky Star, Feng Xiaogang's Personal Tailor and the Ex-Files series, a run of romantic comedies and youth dramas that tracked the Chinese box office boom of the early 2010s almost exactly.

Then came Keep Running, the Chinese version of the Korean variety format, where he has been a fixture for years across the main show and its many spin-offs. Variety television in China is not a sideline. It is where mainstream fame is manufactured, and it is why his name comes attached to Forbes China Celebrity 100 rankings in 2015, 2017 and 2019. It also means his acting has been fitted around a schedule most film actors never carry.

The serious credits are worth separating out. He is in two Zhang Yimou pictures, The Great Wall and Shadow, plays a soldier in the war epic The Eight Hundred, and appears in Wong Kar-wai's Blossoms Shanghai. Western audiences most likely met him as Ryan Choi, the scientist in Zack Snyder's Justice League, a role that exists only in Snyder's version of that film. More recently he has moved toward genre features such as Bureau 749 and Escape from the Outland.