Zhao Jinmai

Zhao Jinmai has been on Chinese screens since she was a child, starting in television around 2012 and moving into the Balala the Fairies films soon after, a franchise made for precisely the audience she belonged to at the time. Most careers that begin there do not survive adolescence. Hers did, partly because she kept training: she came up through the Central Academy of Drama and graduated in 2024, working the whole way through.

The pivot was The Wandering Earth in 2019, where she played Han Duoduo in a science fiction blockbuster with an enormous domestic audience, and Growing Pain the same year, a family drama in which she played the daughter. Forbes China listed her under 30 Under 30 Asia that year. She has since returned to Han Duoduo for the special edition release and is credited for The Wandering Earth III.

What she gets used for now is a particular kind of contemporary lead: bright, sceptical, faintly guarded. That covers the romance and youth drama (A Little Thing Called First Love, Amidst a Snowstorm of Love, One Week Friends) and the genre television that asks for more (Reset, The Princess Royal, Shine on Me). It is a great deal of work for somebody born in 2002, and the volume is the risk: the 2024 and 2025 credits are arriving faster than any of them can be judged.