Silver Bear winner not afraid of risks

A scene from Black Coal,Thin Ice,in which Liao Fan plays the lead.

Interview with Liao Fan (Chinese)

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Liao has such a wide range that, in If You're the One 2, he was cast as a man who had undergone a sex change, a failed one at that because the role was played by another actor in the first movie. "Director Feng Xiaogang thought of me, and I took it mainly out of curiosity," Liao explains. "Now that you asked me, it was indeed a challenge for audiences accustomed to see me in macho roles."

Liao's concern about audience acceptance was less significant compared to his worries that his gay friends might say he was not credible enough in the role. "I envied actors like Sean Penn in Milk. The character was so much more fully developed. Mine was a cameo - just to get a laugh."

Liao's role in Black Coal, Thin Ice is his first leading role that will hit the big screen. (The movie opens on March 21 across China.) His previous two big movies offered him equally intense and three-dimensional characters, which he tackled fearlessly, but they never saw the light of day, not officially. "This script gives me a lot of room (to test my acting skills) and its range even spans five years, with my character going through an emotional roller coaster," he says, commenting on his role as Zhang Zili, a cop who failed in a mission and carried his shame to his subsequent life as a security guard.

For this part, Liao did a lot of research and fieldwork, talking to cops and watching their police videos. He observed absurdities of the daily drudgery along with risks they have to endure. There was a case when the cops got a reliable tip and busted a guy holding out in a hotel room. The guy would not confess. Eventually, they realized they had mixed up one digit with the room number. That kind of thing happens frequently in real life, he says, but in this movie a sense of black humor permeates the atmosphere rather than the plot.

To show the character's downfall from grace, Liao put on a lot of weight for the post-trauma scenes. This is typical of Hollywood actors, but still quite rare in China. "Whatever good or bad side he has, I have to make him real," Liao says.

Moreover, the role is demanding in that much of his emotional conflict is not given a physical form, but rather, conveyed through moments of silence and very few physical movements. "I did make designs for his physicality, such as the weight gain, but I can understand the repressed feeling he had because I went through a similar stage of depression in my life. So I could totally relate to him."

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