When director Kitao Sakurai rang Callina Liang to tell her she had secured the role of Chun-Li, she was outdoors. “I was in a park screaming at the top of my lungs,” the twenty-six-year-old actor said over Zoom.
The casting puts Liang in the centre of Legendary Entertainment and Capcom’s live-action adaptation of Street Fighter, distributed globally by Paramount Pictures. Directed by Sakurai and set in 1993, the film follows Ryu, played by Andrew Koji, and Ken Masters, played by Noah Centineo. Chun-Li brings the estranged fighters back together by inviting them to enter the World Warrior Tournament.
Liang spent her childhood playing the arcade machines in Chaoyang, Beijing. “My grandma would take me there, and this was always the game I gravitated towards,” she said. She remains an active player, having downloaded Street Fighter 6 on her PlayStation 5 console. “I’m a huge gamer now, and I’m a big fan of fighting games. And I always say Street Fighter was the game that got me into my love for gaming.”
Internet commentary began almost immediately after trade publications announced her casting. A discussion thread on Reddit singled out her physique, claiming her legs lacked the dimensions of the Capcom video game model. Liang read the remarks.
“I think when I got cast in this role, I remember that there was this Reddit post saying that my thighs were nowhere near as big as Chun-Li,” she said.
Liang understood the reaction from the community. “As a huge fan myself, I would want whoever plays Chun-Li to be what I envisioned her to be like in my head,” she said. “She looks insane. Her body is insane.”
Her preparation window was tight. “I did feel a lot of pressure. I was like, ‘Right, I gotta get my st together.’ My motto the whole time was ‘No regrets. Give it your all. It doesn’t matter how big you can physically get.’ You know, I only had two months. I had to be realistic with myself. I had to be a functioning human being who could act on screen at the end of the day.”
Liang committed to a strict daily training schedule in Toronto, Canada. “Chun-Li is all kicks. So we did a bunch of Taekwondo training, Muay Thai, and Wushu,” she said. She lifted weights for two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon.
Her diet changed completely to add physical bulk. She ate a meal every two hours, including a dozen eggs each day. “I managed to put on about 20 pounds in a month and a half. So it was a crazy process for sure, but it was also very therapeutic. I really enjoyed getting all my anger out, learning how to fight and to kick. Now I keep it up. I can’t stop. It’s addictive, and it’s a form of therapy.”
By the end of the shoot in Sydney, Australia, Liang added 6.5 centimetres to the circumference of each thigh. Her stunt double wore padded layers on set so their silhouettes matched during complex stunt sequences. Liang also studied video clips of the character on her phone, breaking down the fight animations in slow motion.
Chun-Li is the first female fighter introduced to the franchise, debuting in 1991. The character seeks revenge against M. Bison, played in the film by David Dastmalchian, who murdered her father. Liang observed personal overlaps with the character’s background and personality traits, including their identical height of 169 centimetres, type A blood, and fondnesses for sweets.
“She doesn’t really have any family members other than her father … and me too,” Liang said. “I don’t have any siblings, and I only have my dad. So growing up it was me and my dad and no one else. She’s pretty stubborn, very headstrong, very determined. If she wants something, she’s gonna get it done. So I related to her in that way … and as a woman, navigating in this world by yourself. I moved away from my family at a pretty young age. I was in boarding school from the age of five.”
Liang was born in Vancouver, moved to Beijing during infancy, and relocated to Sydney in 2010. She moved to Singapore four years later, studying performance at LASALLE College of the Arts before moving to New York in 2019.
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Her screen credits include the British drama series Tell Me Everything, Steven Soderbergh’s 2024 film Presence alongside Lucy Liu, and the 2024 heist drama Bad Genius opposite Benedict Wong. Both Liu and Wong served as professional sounding boards for Liang as she built her career.
“They showed me that there is a place for us in this world that isn’t predominantly for Asian people, so they inspired me truly,” she said.
Securing complex parts remains a work in progress. “You gotta find jobs that are open to casting an ethnicity without being specific to it,” Liang said. “There are a lot of stereotypical roles sometimes. It’s gotten better, but I think there’s definitely still room for improvement. It’s been a lot easier than what actors from the previous generation had to deal with. I’m grateful, but I’m still fighting for more.”
Liang speaks Mandarin fluently and speaks some Chinese dialogue in Street Fighter. She remains interested in working within East Asian cinema if the right production appears.
“My family wants me to go into the Chinese cinema world,” she said. “I find the acting styles to be pretty different. If I ever get the opportunity to, I wouldn’t turn it down. It would be a dream of mine to use my first language in a film, doing what I love. That would mean a lot to me.”
For now, she visits her grandmother in Beijing whenever her filming schedule permits, walking through neighbourhoods that continue to change. Street Fighter is out in cinemas worldwide.
