Asian A.V. Club newsletter #25: Poppy Liu
Kicking off our new Actor talk series, Poppy Liu gives us hilarious insight on her coming to America story, search for identity and playing a plethora of fun characters from Hacks to Space Cadet
Poppy Liu is a natural-born storyteller. From the moment our interview kicked off, her talent for spinning a tale, peppered with cheeky asides, and nailing the delivery was exactly what we hoped for. Born in Xi'an, China, and moving to Minnesota at the age of two, Poppy's love for the arts sparked early. But she took her time figuring out who she was before seriously diving into acting as a career. This thoughtful approach paid off as Liu quickly nabbed a role as one-half of the spoiled sibling duo (with Joel Kim Booster) in Sunnyside. Then she snagged a recurring role in the Emmy-winning comedy Hacks and hasn't looked back since. We caught up with Poppy while she was promoting her role as the supportive, overly creative, and very pregnant best friend Nadine Cai in the broad comedy Space Cadet.
Asian A.V. Club: Poppy! We just want you to know that you are kicking off our new actor talk series on Asian A.V. Club, so thank you for doing this. As with all our previous interviewees, we love a good origins story, so like any superhero, do you remember the moment where you think you got your superpower to want to be more expressive, or something you saw that inspired you to want to pursue creativity as an outlet?
Poppy Liu: Oh wow, I love that. (laughs) I think my whole life, I've always been a performer. I started dancing when I was like five. I was doing classical Chinese dance for nine years. But weirdly, this story just came to mind. I was born in China, and we emigrated to Minnesota when I was two years old. My dad had actually emigrated a year and a half before my mom and I did because at the time, it was really hard to get your paperwork to get out of China. So, he was like, let’s try, if it doesn’t work, then I'll just come back. And my mom literally spends a full year preparing for this. She's like, I'm gonna get all my documents, I'm gonna prepare the speech for the customs guy, because it'll all boil down to a one government worker who will let you in or not.
So, she’s got this whole speech plan of how it's been X number of months, weeks, days, hours, minutes down to the second that we've been separated, and we just want to be back together as a family again. And like, we’re from very humble origins and as you can see, we dress very humbly, from the village where our clothing matches the bedsheets because it’s the same fabric and it’s the law. Like this entire narrative. (laughs)
And so, we go to America and she's holding me, and I have my little stuffed animal. And she's like, Yuan Yuan, that’s my Chinese name, “兔宝宝找不到妈妈了” which in English is like, ‘your little bunny rabbit can't find her mom.’ So, it was like, (sad face). My mom literally knows how to do drama. I think I get it from my mom. (laughs) She knows how to create a scene where both of us are in these matching comforters and I'm literally clutching on to my stuffed animal for dear life.
Obviously, I don't have memory of this, but she goes up to this guy, who doesn't even look up at her. And he's just stamping his papers and doing his thing. And he says briskly, “去哪儿”, which means, ‘where to’, and before my mom could even speak, I spoke up and said, “去美国” which is, ‘go to America’. He looks up and asks me “去美国干嘛”, which is ‘why are you going to America?’ and I was like, “去美国找爸爸” which is, ‘go to America to find dad.’ And literally the next thing he says is, “叔叔让你去找爸爸” which means ‘Uncle will let you find your dad’.
And my mom literally hasn't said a word. She's just standing there in shock because he's like stamping everything. She even leaves without the paperwork, and everyone is shouting saying go back, the paperwork! That story came to mind. I guess maybe that was my first performance as a child working the legal system to reunite my diasporic family. (laughs)
Asian A.V. Club: Oh my gosh, that story is amazing! I gotta ask, when you were older, what was the conversation like with your parents about wanting to pursue acting?
Poppy Liu: I think with my parents, they really let me explore a lot of stuff. But I feel like the caveat was that I always had to be a straight A student. I could do theater, dance, whatever, only if I maintained straight A's. And I was a really good student. In fact, I actually didn't go to college for acting. I went to a very finance, Wall Street centered, liberal arts school, which is kind of like strange looking back. But I feel maybe subconsciously, I was like, I have to do something real now to support my family. I can't do this forever. But I think it's hard to escape who you are. I ended up still graduating as a double major in theater and Women's Studies. (laughs) College also radicalized me where I was like, Oh, my God, gender and identity and race! In the end, I think you find your way still.
Asian A.V. Club: Out of curiosity, I know you moved back to China in your teens, was there a culture shock on your end entering a world where you are part of the majority again and not a minority like you were in the States?
Poppy Liu: Definitely. I came to the States when I was so young. So, all my formative years are all from Minnesota. I moved back to China when I was 14, and by then, I was very Americanized. Not just American, but specifically Midwestern. My life was very much a split screen in Minnesota. I went to public school where it was majority white. And then on the weekends, every Saturday, I went to Chinese school, which I hated at the time, but now I'm really grateful that I'm bilingual and I can do some really basic reading and writing, then Sundays I did Chinese dance. And my parents entire social circle was all Chinese families. And so, I just had this dual world, and it didn't feel weird. I think as a kid, the only thing you know is the thing that you know, I like had no other experiences to compare it to.
But when I went back to China, it was kind of a reverse culture shock, where I felt kind of othered because spoke Mandarin with an American accent. And people are always like, ‘Oh, where are you from?’ And I was like… ‘here’. (laughs) And then I felt obligated to explain I was from this place called “Minnesota” because no one knows what that is. I also went to an American school and the thing that was also really jarring was the class difference that we suddenly jumped into when I turned 14. By the time we left the States, my parents had been steadily climbing the career ladder and when we returned to China, we came back as expats. Immediately, I'm in this school with kids of diplomats, or the richest families of South Korea, it was really weird. And there was even racial discrimination among the international community in China, where it was considered a diss back in high school to say you sound ‘local’. So, I was like, oh my God, white supremacy is here too. (laughs)
Asian A.V. Club: After you came back to the states and studied acting in college, it feels like you booked jobs pretty quickly soon afterwards. But what’s more interesting is that the jobs were leaning towards comedic roles. Was comedy the acting route you always wanted to go for?
Poppy Liu: Interestingly, I didn't come straight out of college and immediately start auditioning. I have a lot of friends who took that route, but I spent many years after graduating, just doing really, really, really indie, community grassroots art stuff in New York. I did a lot of social activism stuff because maybe a part of me felt like I didn’t know myself enough yet and I had to find my people. I didn't really discover the queer community until I was in my mid 20s. I don't think it was even until I graduated from college that I really contended with my racial identity either.
Most of my friends in college were white and I remember having a conversation with one of my best friends, where we lived together the whole time and was inseparable. Two years after college, she was like, ‘I feel like we're kind of drifting apart, what's going on?’ And I told her, ‘Honestly, I'm contending for the first time in my life that I'm Chinese American. And I realize now that in college that all of our friends were white and there was no space for me to even think about my own identity in that way.’ And I remember her saying, ‘Oh, my God, it didn't even occur to me that you were a person of color.”
Asian A.V. Club: Oh, this happened to me in college too.
Poppy Liu: Clearly, there's a whole side thing to be said about Asian proximity to whiteness and among BIPOC the sort of myth of the model minority and how it can benefit a majority of Asians, I could go on. (laughs) But I feel like on a personal level, being a young person in my 20s, I spent many years just finding myself and my community. And once I had a pretty good grounding in myself, that was the first time I started trying to audition for TV, and like you said, I picked up really quickly, which is amazing. But I think, by that time, I knew who I was. And I feel like I knew how to bring that forward in a way that I just don't think I would have been able to in my earlier 20s.
My first two projects were both crowdfunded community made. The first one, [Names of Women] was my abortion story. The second one [Mercy Mistress] was my friend's semi-autobiographical life story about being a Chinese American professional dominatrix in New York. And it took two years for us to crowdfund and make it. I feel like all of that gave me a really solid foundation that I wasn't really entering the industry from a scarcity mentality of, ‘oh my God, when they pick me.’ It was more like, ‘let me see what this is about.’
Asian A.V. Club: But you quickly booked a role in Sunnyside which is a full-on ensemble comedy. And you’re pretty much authentically funny or scene stealing in everything you’ve done since. That’s a whole other skill set.
Poppy Liu: Okay, to be totally honest, it literally was the very first pilot season I did, which was in February of 2019. I booked a series regular role in Sunnyside because casting director Allison Jones [The Office, The Good Place, Barbie], scooped me up for that. Unfortunately, we only had one season, but it was it was a nice first foray into TV. I think just kind of how the industry is, when they see you do something, and like it, they end up giving you a lot of that. The very next thing I did was Hacks, which the month after season one came out, I've been working nonstop, other than my maternity break that I took. It's a great show and I think people are like, ‘oh, yeah, we see you do comedy, therefore more comedy.’ (laughs)
Asian A.V. Club: What I like about your new film Space Cadet, is that there’s a very 90’s comedy nostalgic energy throughout. What was it like to be part of a film that celebrates this type of comedy that we don’t really get to experience as much anymore.
Poppy Liu: I think that's so right, there's something nostalgic about it. But honestly because the way films are made, the entire story is deconstructed. My character Nadine is part of the Florida portion of the world. I don’t get to interact with the NASA part at all. So, I just showed up and did what I needed to. A lot of times when the stuff that you do comes out, it feels like I'm watching it for the first time. So, when I watched it, I was like, ‘whoa’, I’m surprised that I’m actually in it, because it’s a really fun movie. (laughs)
I loved the script by writer/director Liz Garcia. I was like kind of blown away more than I thought that I would be, particularly in this genre and tone of film. It just isn't around that much. I don't know why. Maybe the pandemic happened, and everyone was just in a coping state, and everything just felt a little darker. So, for something that's just feel good, where the support of friends help you get your dreams, reach your goals and doing the unthinkable, I think we haven't seen that in a while. It was really a bomb to watch it that first time.
Asian A.V. Club: Poppy, you’re our bomb, it was so fun talking to you!
Poppy Liu: Thank you!
Space Cadet is streaming now on Prime Video
Have been obsessed w/poppy since ep 1 of sunnyside!!! have watched compilations of All Of The (Half-)Twins scenes more than once 🫡🫡🫡 this was such a thoughtful interview, ty!