Author | Nanfengchuang reporter Zhao Shuhe
from Pingyao, Shanxi
She is a poet who speaks volumes under the stars, a friend who accompanies us with chatter, she is Wu Yun, a migrant worker who pokes our soft hearts, and she is also a little character Tan on the screen. Na. A top student at Peking University, a talk show queen, a variety show talent, and a new actor, these labels cannot define her diverse endeavors. Perhaps she never wanted to be defined. The girl who came out of the "big city" Tieling is liked by more people. On the way across borders, what remains unchanged is her spirited humor and the romance hidden in comedy. Hello everyone, she is Li Xueqin.
When we met for the first time, Li Xueqin was greeting me before I even stepped into the interview room.
She took the initiative to "cue the process" and asked me to sit down. "Just start asking what you want to ask."
Li Xueqin speaks very quickly. There is almost no time to think between hearing the question and giving the answer. She can quickly give a definite answer. Only when specific dates, places, and events are involved, she will stop and carefully recall them.
exchanged a few words with her back and forth, and my speaking speed was also accelerated - her language is very contagious, both in form and content.
2020 is an important node in Li Xueqin’s career. Since then, her story has been known to many people. His parents divorced when he was a teenager, and he was ranked first in the exams since he was a child. He went all the way to a key high school and Peking University, but his life was not very happy. After returning to China after graduating from New York University, she first made short videos, and then did talk shows, and contributed such god-level jokes as "The end of the universe is Tieling". At that time, everyone said that Li Xueqin was a genius. Next, she became a regular guest in variety shows, acting in sitcoms, singing, leaning on the sofa, chatting with friends, and sparks of inspiration always bloomed in her words - small, bright, but enough to illuminate our moment. Nearly 4 years after
became popular, how has Li Xueqin changed now?
In October 2023, Nan Fengchuang met Li Xueqin at the Pingyao International Film Festival. This time, she was an actress and the starring role in the movie "Xiaoyao·You".
It seems that defining Li Xueqin has become a difficult task. People who like Li Xueqin say that smart people "do one thing, do one thing, do one thing, and do one thing." In her words, "When people come to me, I will do my best."
Just like she said, Northeastern people have the habit of saving plastic bags. You don’t know when which plastic bag will be used. Li Xueqin is exploring what she can do and do well. When she is free, she thinks about how to make herself happy.
Perhaps, instead of defining Li Xueqin by what she has done, it is better to look at how Li Xueqin does these things. When chatting with
, Li Xueqin refused to use clichés or perfunctory words. She said whatever she wanted and was not afraid to show her vulnerability, just like she did on the show.
Behind her various identities, she is still a simple, hard-working and real person.
01
Actor Li Xueqin, irreplaceable
If you ask Li Xueqin why she went to film, her answer will be simple, "Because they are looking for me."
Some answers should probably be found from the director and the audience: Why should Li Xueqin act? Why do people love to watch Li Xueqin act?
At the beginning of 2021, Dapeng participated in the interview show of film critic Guan Yadi as a guest. He said, "I like Li Xueqin so much." They shared the life experience of Northeastern people, and Dapeng appreciated her ability, "Li Xueqin is fundamentally educated. ". If there is a chance, Dapeng said that he would like to make a movie for her.
In this year, Li Xueqin became Wei Ruyi. In order for Li Xueqin to participate in "Keep You Safe", Dapeng changed the role of the hero's mother to his younger sister - a girl who works in a horror secret room, a little silly, but also a little bit smart.
In the movie, Wei Pingan went to the store to find Wei Ruyi. She was at work, dressed as a ghost and hanging upside down from the ceiling.
This is Li Xueqin's first appearance on the big screen.
In "Keep You Safe", Li Xueqin didn't have many roles, but she was outstanding. Taking Wei Ping'an to have his illness checked out and having dinner with Chairman Jin, played by Jia Bing, are all very funny scenes in the film.She is also responsible for saying the most important "question" of the whole film, "When you say a girl is a lady, no matter whether she is or not, she already is."
In the same year, Li Xueqin participated in "Xiaoyao·You" directed by Liang Ming. When casting for the movie, Liang Ming didn't know Li Xueqin, but producer Wu Jueren recommended her, saying "she is super popular now."
Liang Ming and Li Xueqin made an appointment to meet at a "now closed" afternoon tea shop in Lidu, Beijing. Liang Ming discovered that this comedy star who became "super popular" overnight had a faint sadness on his face when he was not speaking.
This kind of sadness is very charming, which attracted Liang Ming immediately. He later went to see Li Xueqin shoot a commercial. She shot the same piece of content 20 times, and she was able to provide subtle differences every time. Liang Ming confirmed, "This is a talent." After the filming was completed, Liang Ming said that Li Xueqin was irreplaceable.
Recently, in a live broadcast of "Hometown, Stay Safe" (hereinafter referred to as "Hometown"), Li Xueqin introduced herself behind three other actresses. She said hello everyone, I am "actor" Li Xueqin. The
host joked about this prefix. Li Xueqin quickly explained: "I saw that all three of them said that, so I just said it in passing, (after all) they have all acted."
It seems that we are more difficult to adapt to this change than Li Xueqin.
For Li Xueqin, in his more than two years of electric shock career, there is not even any experience, "it is just a study."
At first she didn’t understand the camera position or the props, so she acted “according to the logic of life”. However, this might cause her movements to be incorrect or block others. After filming several movies now, she will start to pay attention to these details. It is a kind of acting thinking, taking into account the camera and the opponent actors. "This way in the later stage of the performance, it can be more friendly to the editing teacher."
is just like writing a talk show at the beginning, "just write, just do it." Li Xueqin also thinks about filming in a down-to-earth manner: Is it because some of the lines are not speaking smoothly because I am not in the right mood or because the words were not written smoothly in the first place? Some expressions may only take two seconds, but four or five seconds is enough.
After coming off the show every day, she writes down these experiences in a small notebook. I think more and more carefully, and it’s hard to say whether I’m making progress or not, “I’ll just study first anyway.”
Among the roles she has played so far, Wu Yun in "Hometown" is the most challenging one.
The difficulty is to convey a convincing feeling to the audience-Wu Yun can fall in love with a handsome guy.
Wu Yun's "Moji" is completely the opposite of Li Xueqin. If she were herself, "I would have asked him if he liked me a long time ago, and she would not have been Moji for more than 30 episodes." She made an Excel spreadsheet for Wu Yun's story line, and grasped the emotional changes and psychological activities of the characters bit by bit. After sorting out the plot, she really felt that the progress was too slow, so she wrote a suggestion in Excel: How about Let’s ask Wu Yun and Liu Wenshan to add WeChat in this episode, right?
The thing that worried her the most turned out to be the highlight of the drama. After it was broadcast, the audience not only accepted the setting of a handsome guy falling in love with an ordinary girl, but even "got it" one after another. This pair of CPs was also given a beautiful name, "Yunshan Wuluo". If you search on Bilibili, there are videos of fans cutting sugar-eating videos everywhere.
Li Xueqin's long-term netizen and film critic Guan Yadi said that many directors will be fascinated by this kind of actor, and you don't know what she will give you.
She always surprises people.
02
Stretching straight in all directions
Before filming the first scene of "Xiaoyao·you", Li Xueqin was very nervous.
In the scene, Tan Na was about to wash off the tattoo she had gotten for her ex-boyfriend. When the tattoo removal machine came around, Li Xueqin relaxed. The director said that this speech was enough and there was no need to scream. Li Xueqin said to the director, it would not work without screaming. It really hurts.
The sense of relaxation brought by real pain liberated Li Xueqin's performance. When
evaluates Li Xueqin's acting skills, the most common word is "natural", which may be related to her use of a lot of improvisation.
The information in the script of "Xiaoyao·you" is very concise, "often just one line (word)", so she needs to exert a lot of effort. In the tattoo shop scene, she wrote all the lines herself. In the movie, she played a couple with Diplodocus, and there was so much improvisation that she couldn't remember which scenes were planned. "Brother Long and I hugged there for a long time. Maybe the director thought it was too disgusting, so he kept it for a while."
On the way to Shanhaiguan, there was a scene where Tanna wanted to go to the toilet and couldn't hold it in. , got off the car and found a piece of wild land, and she squatted in the pit. The car said there was no paper, and Tanna said it was okay, I would just shake her arms a few times.
Li Xueqin liked this scene very much, but it was later cut due to the length.
She regretted that these scenes were not presented in the end, but it was obvious that she was very happy when describing this relatively free creative state. "The three of us (the three protagonists, the other two are Lu Xingchen and Zhao Bingrui) are very immersed in that role. The three of us are what we are in the play and what we are outside."
Tan Na's job is to sell clothes at a shopping mall stall. Li Xueqin's aunt did this. She said that she didn't need to adapt or rehearse. As soon as she arrived there, her bargaining and sales skills came out naturally, and she didn't need to imitate her expression or tone.
Rather than talking about talent, Li Xueqin prefers to say that this is a kind of luck, because the movie is about her life. She has grown up in such an environment since she was a child, and they are all people she has met.
When Li Xueqin returned to China in 2018, it was just when Northeastern literature began to revive. At that time, she did not know that she was about to participate in this wave. "Xiaoyao·you" was shot in Shenyang, which is the hometown of the original author Ban Yu and the "big city" in Tieling native Li Xueqin's mind when she was a child. When she went back this time, Li Xueqin felt that Shenyang was not that old anymore. "I felt like my parents were getting old."
She and Ban Yu met at the "Talk Show Conference", and the latter gave her a copy of "Winter Swimming" with the message "Stretch straight in all directions." Li Xueqin understood this as a blessing for her, "I hope I can be free, no one wants to keep walking on the same path."
After she was confirmed to star in "Happy Journey", Li Xueqin kept calling Ban Yu. She trusted him, "(Ban Yu) is very friendly and kind, considers others, and is talented." She kept asking him questions about characters: whether Tan Na walked fast, how many relationships Tan Na had had, whether Tan Na had one-night stands... all the wild questions, Ban Yu patiently answered her.
When she was filming in Shenyang, Ban Yu took her to a farmer's market he was most familiar with. After shopping for a long time, he even bought her a hat. The slight sadness in her heart makes Tanna such a sad character. "In the original work, she was divorced, and she worked at a stall selling underpants and vests every day. Her relationship was not going well, and her parents probably didn't care about her very much. Her sadness was not deliberately presented, it was brought to her by life, but she also She is a person who is willing to fight with life. If you hit me, I will hit you back."
Filming "Happy Journey" was something that she found particularly meaningful and valuable after entering the entertainment industry.
A few years ago, the media asked her what label she most wanted to label herself, and she said "beauty." She has received a lot of malicious comments because of her appearance. If one day everyone thinks she is a beauty, then the world will be really diverse.
When filming a movie, she doesn't have much anxiety about appearance. "It seems that people are more concerned about your appearance when filming TV series, but in movies, especially in this kind of realistic themes, whether you are beautiful or not is not that important."
And you can take a lot of shots in movies, so it doesn't matter if you are wrong. One more.
I suddenly remembered that when she was a student, Li Xueqin was good at taking exams but was afraid of them. She asked herself to do well in the exam, otherwise her parents and teachers would be disappointed. Especially after her parents divorced, she could not let others think that her mother had "delayed the child." She studied in the best key high school in Liaoning, which produces many Tsinghua and Peking University students every year and is also famous for its strict Hengshui-style management. Li Xueqin cried every time she went back to school from her hometown Tieling.After her short video became popular, becoming famous did not let her relax. New pressures followed her, and she worried every day about how to avoid being forgotten by the audience.
So I asked, is it rare in life that you encounter such opportunities that allow you to make mistakes and start over again?
Li Xueqin suddenly looked at me seriously and said: "Actually, making a movie is very happy. You are living a life that can be remade and have another life. In our normal lives, no one has the opportunity to have another life. ."
She is very grateful that filming allows her to temporarily not have to be herself, "In the movie, I am not myself anymore, I am Tanna, which gives me a great sense of security."
03
One day she may write a novel
Filming may indeed have cured Li Xueqin to a certain extent.
Over the years, Li Xueqin has been "fighting naked" with the outside world. The lack of confidence she shows towards the audience and peers is all true to her. She said, I can do whatever I do off stage and on the show. When
was filming, she could briefly put on a gentle shell, and her tight self could rest and hide behind the character.
In fact, she didn't have to be so nervous.
According to Da Zhangwei, Li Xueqin is a genius without knowing it. Mao Buyi said that there is a threshold of confidence between Li Xueqin and her true charm.
More and more people are telling Li Xueqin that you can actually relax a little. Thinking of her experiences in the past few years, Li Xueqin said that the biggest change in herself is that she is no longer so fearful of society. "Everyone can see that I am more cheerful than before."
Whether it was in college, or later in "Talk Show" or filming, at the beginning, Li Xueqin was the "newcomer at the party", sitting in the corner uneasily. Only when someone came to play with her did she enter the group. lively.
Now, more and more people know her at this party, and Li Xueqin is not so scared anymore.
Li Xueqin said that her courage to break into the crew came from "colleagues who trust you."
In every crew, she will find a psychological counselor. During the filming of "Keep You Safe", screenwriter Su Biao was also her good friend, and she would tell him any confusion she had; in "Clingy Club", she asked Zhang Yichi for "psychological counseling"; in "Hometown" she relied on Shi Ce , and a little sister who is a producer. "I just need someone I trust to help me relieve my tension and anxiety. I can keep telling them my thoughts."
When she thinks about the movies she has filmed and the programs she has done, she feels a little regretful. During the filming, even though everyone said she was good and the director was quite satisfied, she still felt that "maybe that would be better." This kind of self-demandingness cannot be resolved, and "I can't sleep all night long."
But, "Just shoot it the next day."
A few months ago, her high school classmate Hui Zi made a series of videos on We Media "Looking for Classmates from Ten Years Ago". In Li Xueqin’s video, Huizi said that she was his inspiration for online novels. Faced with fierce competition in a key high school, Li Xueqin would be very panicked if someone else won the award and participated in independent enrollment, feeling that she might have been left behind. Teruko said that at that time it was useless to watch Kundera or Haruki Murakami, so she had to watch "The Sky". Li Xueqin nodded fiercely: "We still have to rely on this." The logic in
is "Ran, don't be afraid of losing, as the tides turn, one day it will be our turn." This belief sustained them throughout their high school lives.
Now, ten years after graduating from high school, Li Xueqin’s solution is to read novels. “Sometimes I cry when I read them.”
I think we can trust a person who still believes in passionate novels ten years after graduating from high school.
Li Xueqin is like most of us. She was born and raised in a small city. She worked from dawn to dusk to study, then went to college, and then found a job. The similar trajectory made everyone resonate a lot with her. She is just like us in entertainment. A friend in the circle.
When she was in high school, Li Xueqin’s dream was to be a writer. Today, when I ask her what she wants to do most, she still answers "write novels."When we chatted for the second time, I tried to ask: Do you have a story in your heart that you want to tell?
She said it wasn’t just one, but many, but the time to say it out hadn’t come yet.
After many people become famous, it seems inevitable that they will get further and further away from ordinary life. Li Xueqin is also worried that her understanding of life will be squeezed out by work. Her expression is inherently precious because she is "very life-like". For this reason, she tried her best to record every moment she felt, and she was more willing to get to know others and see what kind of life her friends and college classmates in her hometown were living.
When she is not so busy at work, she will go back to Tieling. "My way to rest is to go back to Tieling." Or just ride a shared bicycle around Beijing, see what other people are doing, and chat with strangers - but, we wonder, can Li Xueqin still find strangers who don't know her so easily?
Li Xueqin felt that this was not a problem. She answered very simply: "Hey, there are people I don't know. There are many people I don't know."
She would also feel like she was floating in mid-air. Sometimes she would be on the plane every day for a week, opening her eyes. I don't know where I am, I feel quite floating. But once she returned to life and rode a shared bicycle, she felt better.
She suddenly remembered a little thing: "Once I was riding a bicycle and waiting for a red light. There was a bus on my left and an electric car on my right. I was faced with a choice between two. I had to let one of them run over me. When I passed by my feet, the road was so crowded at that time. Then I definitely couldn't choose the bus, so I let the electric car run over my feet."
It was quite fun, Li Xueqin said, at that moment, she I feel very at ease.
Editor | Huang Mingting
New Media Editor | A Shu
Typesetting | Qianwen
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