Liu Ye can still recall the day 10 years ago when his father returned home with a pirated DVD he'd bought on the street. It was a copy of Stanley Kwan Kam-pang's Lan Yu, in which Liu played the leading role. His performance attracted critical acclaim and led him to a best actor title at Taiwan's prestigious Golden Horse awards.
'He said, 'This is the movie for which our son won an award, we've to see this',' Liu says. 'They were very serious about the whole thing - they brewed a pot of tea and sat themselves properly in front of the TV before clicking play. I went, 'I'll leave you to it then', before scurrying back to my room.'
It wasn't just out of a sense of modesty that Liu didn't watch Lan Yu with his parents. It was because he had never told them that he played a character struggling with a rocky homosexual relationship, a topic which was (and still is) a taboo subject in mainland filmmaking and the reason why the movie was (and still is) only available on the sly.
'I think they were worried about hurting my feelings, so they clenched their teeth and braved the whole film,' says Liu, now 33. 'But eventually my father pulled me to the side and said to me, 'Don't ever make films like this again!''
Liu Jianhua was probably worried his son would eventually spend his whole life making officially censured underground films. He would never have imagined then that Liu Ye would become one of most well-regarded mainland actors of his generation. He has appeared on screen as lovelorn young men and scowling villains; he is a scheming prince in Zhang Yimou's Curse of the Golden Flower, a menacing snow wolf in Chen Kaige's The Promise and a heroic soldier in Lu Chuan's City of Life and Death.
Liu's versatility will be given another airing this year, as he appears in two roles which are poles apart in their characterisation and symbolic meaning. This month, he will be seen in Andrew Lau Wai-keung's urbane romance drama A Beautiful Life, in which he plays a policeman who has to contend with his relationship with a self-centred property agent (played by Shu Qi) while also taking care of his mentally disabled younger brother (played by former diving champion Tian Liang) and his own deteriorating health. 'I'm just playing an ordinary guy here,' Liu says.
