Quotes from Simu Liu

You're talking to a guy that graduated from business school by the skin of his teeth, only to crash and burn at his first consulting job. What about that C.V. makes me a good representative of Asian Americans and Canadians?

Shang-Chi can definitely throw a punch.

I remember doing 5th grade math when I was like seven years old. My parents just constantly pushed me, in a good way, to always demand excellence in everything that I did.

When I was 16 years old, I thought that backflips were like the coolest thing. So I spent like months and months of my life like, literally flipping onto my head.

All I really knew how to do was put one foot in front of the other.

The most important thing is to show up. You've just got to get your butt out there.

The main character is always, you know, this blond-haired, blue-eyed guy who's the high school quarterback or the star of the basketball team. That's all I wanted to be, really, truly. I definitely was not that.

To fully understand the roots of anti-Asian prejudice in America, you need to know about the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 that banned all immigration from China, even though it was Chinese immigrants that had essentially built America's railroad system.

I think so often we have these ambitions or these hopes within us that we kill before we ever let it escape our lips because we are afraid.

I got into this business when I was 22 years old, and I didn't have a woke bone in my body. And all I wanted to do was be on screen and for people to pay attention to me, but we evolve and our cause evolves and the conversations today are certainly very different.

You know, 'Hunt for the Wilderpeople' was a great movie that I thoroughly enjoyed.

I studied finance and accounting in college, and I worked at a massive accounting firm out of graduation.

In my entire life, I'd wondered why there were no superheroes out there that looked like me.

Not every director can always rise to the challenge of all of a sudden having $200 million thrown at them.

I had very little time to mentally prepare before I was just kind of thrust into it. And I'm watching all of these movie stars that I idolized sharing the stage with me. And then I'm having dinner with Angelina Jolie because that's how the seating chart worked over at Marvel - and then trying to reconcile all of this in my brain.

So when we were building that superhero workout, that Marvel body, it was really important for us not to sacrifice range of motion and explosiveness, because I've still got to be able to throw a punch at the end of the day.

Kids growing up today will have what I never did growing up, which is somebody across that screen reflecting who they are, and showing them what is possible.

I'm somebody who feels caught between two worlds a lot of the time.

I went through an evolutionary process of learning to have a voice and how to use it, knowing when to step in. I don't always get it right, for sure. However, it's better to speak your mind than hold your tongue and wish you had said something.

All around me, I saw people who were taught by their parents, as I was, to just toe the line, not ruffle the feathers, not rock the boat too much and just put your head down, do your work and that's it. And I think that as a community, we're reaching the limitations of that kind of thinking.

The first set I ended up on was Guillermo del Toro's 'Pacific Rim' that was shooting in Toronto and they needed a bunch of Asian extras, and for some reason they put their ad on Craigslist.

We didn't grow up in any sort of meaningful representation in media apart from, you know, Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Bruce Lee. But, of course, that was different still, because it always played to this narrative of the foreigner from the East.

What needs to change, really, is that we need better representation behind the camera. We need better representation among the people who tell the stories or the people who greenlight the movies.

I think it is so important to have voices in the decision-making process that are sensitive to the groups that your show or your production represents. In the case of 'Kim's Convenience,' that was Korean Canadians, that was East Asian Canadians, and we rightly felt like we didn't have that voice in the writers' room or at the creators' table.