Tang Wei

Tang Wei was born in Hangzhou in 1979 and became internationally known in a single film. Ang Lee cast her in Lust, Caution, which won the Golden Lion, and the explicit nature of her performance led the Chinese government to ban her, so the career that should have begun in 2007 effectively restarted with Crossing Hennessy in 2010.

The specialism that emerged is playing women who are performing a role inside the story. Wong Chia Chi in Lust, Caution is a student actress running a false identity for an assassination plot. Song Seo-rae in Decision to Leave is under investigation and answering questions in a language that is not her own, so the performance sits on the gap between what she means and what a translation app allows her to say. Anna in Late Autumn spends a whole film deciding how much of herself to hand to a stranger. In all three, the drama comes from control rather than from expression, which is a rare thing for an actress to be trusted with repeatedly.

The rest of the work is deliberately spread across industries. The romantic comedies Finding Mr. Right and Finding Mr. Right 2 were mainstream Chinese hits, The Golden Era is a literary biography of the writer Xiao Hong, Long Day's Journey Into Night is unrepentant art cinema, Dragon is a martial arts film, Office and Monster Hunt are big commercial entertainments, and Blackhat is the American thriller. She acts in Mandarin, Korean and English, and the Korean films are where her best performances are.