'Mr Nice Guy' gets a makeover

Filmgoers are looking forward to three films starring the nation's best-loved and award-winning actor. Liu Wei reports.

Ge You fears air travel. And that is going to make the month of December a tough one for him. The nation's most popular actor will have to travel thousands of kilometers by train and car to promote three blockbusters he's starring in. The first to hit the screens is Chen Kaige's Sacrifice on Dec 4, a drama going back 2,500 years, about murder and revenge. Ge plays a doctor who saves an orphan at the cost of his own baby.

He then appears as a swindler during the early 20th century in Jiang Wen's Let Bullets Fly, which will premiere on Dec 16. He also stars in Feng Xiaogang's romantic comedy If You are the One 2, to open on Dec 22, in which he is a middle-aged cinematographer in search of true love.

Although he has played many roles in his 20-year career, he is most impressive impersonating the common man.

If one were to think of a stereotypical image of the 53-year-old, it has to be a bald-headed, a kind and smiling face, wearing an expression that can be foxy at times, but never vicious.

Ge's most prominent role to date is that of Fugui, a farmer who survives endless hardships driven simply by the urge to keep going in Zhang Yimou's To Live. The film won him a Best Actor award in Cannes in 1993, making him the only Chinese actor from the mainland to earn this honor.

In an interview recently with China Daily, Ge says although that honor left him giddy, he was soon back to playing nobodies in Feng's "new year comedies". These yearly flicks have become a must-see for Chinese filmgoers during the holiday season. Ge is ever present on the cast list, and partly responsible for guaranteeing the huge box office success of each and every one of them.

But despite his popularity, Ge keeps a low profile. He rarely accepts interviews, never appears on entertainment shows and is involved in no negative news. Even his grinning face on billboards across the country, endorsing the country's largest telecom company, projects an image of accessibility rather than stardom.

People have come to believe he is what he plays on screen - the guy next door.

Feng Xiaogang, who has had a 13-year association with Ge, says the actor exhausts himself trying to satisfy friends. And he is very careful, Feng adds, not to offend anyone.

It's true. Over the past two months the most frequently asked question of Ge has been: Which of the three (upcoming) films do you like the best?

He has never answered it.

"All are good " he says. "One is an ancient drama, the other is a modern drama, and the last one is a contemporary drama."

He always pauses a lot in conversation, to ponder his answers.

While it may seem like a great honor for an actor to lead in three top directors' films at the same time, he sees it as somewhat of a burden.

"Viewers may get bored seeing me three times in a month. I am doomed," he says, half-joking.

He never loses his cool, no matter what the question thrown at him is, and always answers with sincerity.

He will typically say, "I really don't know how to answer this", or, "This will take me a month to think about" or even a simple, "I am flattered."

While almost all the top directors he works with are known for their sharp tongues and bad tempers, Ge is extraordinarily popular among both audiences and the media.

But it's not as if all his works have been acclaimed. He has appeared in several films by new directors that have received terrible reviews, despite doing reasonably well at the box office thanks to his presence. But he never criticizes the directors in public, instead apologizing to audiences and taking the blame for the films' faults.

Ge's face is well-recognized and he rarely turns down requests for autographs or pictures.

Once, when surrounded by a crowd, someone who could not get close to him slapped him hard on his head. But the actor did not react and let it go. There was once a fan wanting an autograph who said: "You wait here, I am getting a pen."

And Ge actually waited.

"It was the 20,000th time for me (signing an autograph) but was probably the first for him," Ge says. "The first time means a lot."

While he may seem too polite, to the point of being timid, to Chen Kaige, who has worked with him twice, he is very ambitious when it comes to his acting.

Ge is usually unenthusiastic about historical dramas, largely because in two previous films, the moment he appeared on screen, the audience burst into laughter - they could not accept a serious-faced Ge.

But he did agree to star in Chen's Sacrifice.

"He is such an established actor and faces no risk (with this role)," Chen says. "His mettle surprised me. He may seem a softie, but in fact he has great ambition when it comes to acting. In Sacrifice, he challenges himself by playing a person from ancient times."

Although Ge is often thought of as a "Mr Nice Guy", he is picky about many things. He usually reads 30 scripts a year, before choosing just one.

He does not take on a role that he does not understand fully. Chen says he often saw Ge taking what he thought was a nap on the set, but he later realized Ge was actually thinking about his role.

One of his nicknames is "500 million", because he is obsessed with talking to strangers. His friends joke that he must have talked to more than 500 million people by now. But that probably explains how he manages to cover every role with such ease.

With his increasing fame, though, he is finding it harder to chat to strangers.

The actor who is so loved today was never admitted to any acting school. Until 1978, he was a pig farmer in suburban Beijng, a legacy of the "cultural revolution" (1966-76). It was his role in a short skit on pig breeding that took him into a drama troupe.

For years he was offered just cameos, until the 1988 film The Troubleshooters brought out his versatility. At a time when actors and actresses were uniformly good-looking, Ge was a breath of fresh air. But it was not all smooth sailing. Ge still remembers a review he read years ago: "The guy looks so silly, just a look at his teeth makes me want to hit him."

He says he often reminds himself of the old adage: The higher you climb, the harder you fall.

He says he does not aspire to stardom and would rather be known just as an actor.

"An actor is like a worker, you do your job and go home," he says.