Huo Siyan 霍思燕
Huo Siyan began acting while still in school, though after graduating she had planned to study finance. Television audiences knew her from costume dramas, and for her role as an aspiring actress in the Hong Kong film My Name Is Fame, Huo was nominated for a film award. When Joan Chen suggested years later that she play a mother, Siyan had to schedule the shoot around her son's first weeks in kindergarten.
Huo Siyan was born on October 23, 1980, in Beijing. In 1997, a director who made commercials spotted her at an arts festival. She auditioned and appeared in a spot that was shown before Titanic. While still in high school, Huo played Zhang Daxue in the series The Happy Life of Talkative Zhang Damin (2000). Her mother came to the set on weekends, brought food and took clothes home to wash. Siyan was not initially sure she would become an actress. She toyed with the idea of becoming a doctor or a flight attendant, and by the end of school she had decided to study financial management. She had no acting school behind her.
By her own account, she first truly felt like an actress on the set of Shao Nian Tian Zi (2004), where she played U Yunzhu. She had been praised before that, but she still doubted whether this work suited her. In Seven Fairies (2005) she landed the role of the youngest of the heavenly sisters — lighter and more lively. By then she had already appeared in a good deal of television, and Hong Kong audiences knew her from a film about how hard it is for a novice actress to find her place in cinema.
In My Name Is Fame (2006), Huo played Wu Xiaofei, who is helped by a seasoned actor. Before shooting one of the revealing scenes, she decided to do without a body double. Siyan explained that she did not want to entrust to someone else a scene she considered important for her character. By her account, at the time she was thinking about the work itself and did not expect that her success would be judged primarily by that scene. In 2007, for the role of Xiaofei, she was nominated for a Hong Kong Film Award in the Best New Performer category. The award went to another performer, and Huo kept acting in both films and series.
Preparing for Xi An Shi Bian (2007), she read documents about Zhao Si, the wife of the military man Zhang Xueliang, whom she was to play. By her account, she regretted that a dance scene was cut from the series — in it, viewers were supposed to see the character for the first time, and earlier than they ultimately did. And for her role in Distant Thunder (2010), she had to master a thoroughly everyday trade. According to reports from the set, Siyan arrived in Chongqing, learned the local dialect and practiced in a small hair salon — her character earned her living by washing clients' hair. Huo then appeared in the darker thriller Sleepwalker in 3D (2011). It was followed by Double Xposure (2012) and the historical The Last Supper (2012), where she played Concubine Qi.
In 2011, Huo became embroiled in a public spat with actress Crystal Huang Yi. At the time, the press and the internet were discussing a rumor that Siyan had interfered in Huang Yi's marriage. Huo wrote on Weibo that she had long been smeared, and eventually named Huang Yi outright. Huang Yi considered the publications insulting. In March 2012, a Shanghai court accepted her defamation suit. Huang Yi demanded that the posts be deleted and an apology made. In May, a closed-door hearing was held. Afterwards, both sides allowed that the dispute might be settled through a mediator, and Huang Yi said she hoped to put an end to it. Reports at the time did not yet mention either a final agreement or a court ruling.
She met her future husband, actor Du Jiang, in 2012. It turned out that while still a student at the Shanghai Theatre Academy, he had hung a poster for My Name Is Fame in his rented apartment. For their first date, at an exhibition in Beijing's 798 art district, Siyan showed up with a large poodle. They married in 2013, and that same year their son was born. Later Huo talked about how early she had to get used to caring for those close to her. First her mother died of cancer, and soon afterward her grandfather, to whom she was very close, also passed away. Siyan tried not to let her father and grandmother see how anxious she was. By her account, in those years she had to hold herself together. She spoke about her family life with Du in a very different tone. In joint interviews they joked a lot about how they met and how they behaved at first when one of them came to the other's set.
After her son was born, Huo kept acting in films. She had a small role in The Wasted Times (2016), and in 2018 she appeared both in the war film Operation Red Sea and in the comedy Kill Mobile, whose plot centers on several characters at once. When director Joan Chen offered her the role of a mother in English (2022), Siyan did not want to turn it down, even though her son was just about to start kindergarten. Chen pushed back the start of shooting by about a month so that Huo could spend that time with him. Siyan said it was the first time she had played a mother and that she thought a great deal about how adults' fears are passed on to children. Early in her career her mother had come to her on set herself, and now Huo had to leave her own child to go and shoot.
Her son and husband appeared with her on family shows, while in films Huo also took on small roles. After English she starred in Where Nothing Grows (2023), a story about surviving in the desert. There she acted again with Li Chen. Siyan recounted that Du Jiang once even came to the set while her kissing scene with Li was being filmed and sat behind the monitor, pretending to be busy with his phone.
