Lucy Liu

The best minute Lucy Liu has had in a cinema is a speech. In Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003) her O-Ren Ishii sits at the head of a table of Tokyo crime bosses, lets one of them say the wrong thing, and answers him in Japanese until she wants to be understood, at which point she switches to English. Robert Richardson lights the House of Blue Leaves hard and clean so her white kimono reads from the back row, but it is her voice that holds the scene. It is the one stretch of Tarantino's writing here that sounds like the man who wrote Pulp Fiction, and she takes it with relish. Liu has said she saw in O-Ren "an elegance about her and a femininity that I wanted to retain", and that is the performance: the threat is in how little she moves.

Television made her, as Ling Woo on Ally McBeal (1998–2002), and the films came quickly after: Charlie's Angels (2000), a small part as Kitty Baxter in Chicago (2002) that we did not single out, then O-Ren. The complaint at the time was that the parts she was offered around Payback (1999) and Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever (2002) were cold women written to be cold and nothing else. She answered it by going back to television for seven seasons as Joan Watson in Elementary (2012–19), and by voicing Viper across the Kung Fu Panda films, where the voice is the whole performance.

Her recent live-action films have not asked her for much more than the frost. In the 2023 Shazam sequel, Fury of the Gods, she plays Kalypso, daughter of Atlas, as pure temper, and Louise Mingenbach puts her in bronze and gold plate heavy enough to matter, but the script gives her nothing beyond standing on high things and glaring. In Red One (2024) her Zoe runs something called the Mythological Oversight and Restoration Authority from a room full of screens. We were bored, and bored on her behalf: an actor who can make a threat land in two languages spends the film reading the plot off monitors. The Devil Wears Prada 2 (2026) brings her in as Sasha with a name and a purpose and rather less to do than her billing suggests.

What she does well is stillness with something behind it, and it needs a director who will hold on her long enough for it to register. Tarantino did. The superhero and Christmas machines cut away before the look has finished its work, so all that reaches the screen is the coldness, which is the thing critics complained of in 1999. She directs television episodes now. If nobody writes her another table to sit at the head of, she may have to direct one herself.