Kenny Lin Geng-Xin 林更新

Kenny Lin first came to prominence in Scarlet Heart, and in Tsui Hark's films he played the physician Shatuo, a squad commander in The Taking of Tiger Mountain, and Sun Wukong. Under Derek Yee he was cast as a swordsman weary of being the best. After several hit costume dramas, Lin took on the series The Tale of Rose (玫瑰的故事). His character starts out as a caring student and over time becomes the husband against whom the heroine has to fight for the right to live her own way.

Kenny Lin was born in 1988 and grew up in northeast China. His father hoped his son would study dance and land a steady job with a troupe. Lin wanted to try acting and, by his own account, once even walked out of school during one of these arguments. At the Shanghai Theatre Academy he was at first happy to believe that students could spend as much time as they liked lying on the grass, talking about anything at all. When exam time came, it turned out that skipping classes had consequences. After a talk at the academic office, Lin retook the subjects he had failed. He later told this story to academy graduates, who had already found his advice about auditions useful. While still a student he went to castings and agreed to appear as an extra until he began getting bigger roles.

Lin first came to wide attention with Scarlet Heart (2011), a series about a girl from our own time who finds herself at the court of the Kangxi Emperor. Lin played the Fourteenth Prince, a military commander and one of the brothers whose relationships are shaped by the struggle for the throne. As the heroine tries to work out how these people feel about her, she remembers what they do not yet know about their own fate. With the story built this way, even an ordinary conversation with her has consequences for the prince that he cannot foresee. Lin was just past twenty, and the series gave him the chance to step straight into a large ensemble cast. Soon Tsui Hark cast him in Young Detective Dee: Rise of the Sea Dragon (2013) as the physician Shatuo. Dee is only just beginning his service, and Shatuo helps him wherever the case requires knowledge of the body and disease. Beside the detective, Lin could play a man whose usefulness to the investigation emerges gradually.

For The Taking of Tiger Mountain (2014), Tsui called on him again. This time Lin played the commander of a unit that must take the bandits' mountain base. The action unfolded in the northeast, and Lin decided his native accent would come in handy. He even recorded his lines with it. Later, according to the actor, the filmmakers discovered that the man who had served as the model for the commander came from another part of the country, and the voice was replaced. In Wu Shen Zhao Zi Long Lin was already playing the general Zhao Zilong, whom he remembered from the stories of the Three Kingdoms. His co-star was the Korean singer Yoona Lim. According to Lin, during breaks he taught her northeastern expressions. It was precisely the pronunciation the previous director had had to abandon.

He agreed to Sword Master with Derek Yee Tung-Sing after they met on another set. Lin arrived there with drinks, they talked briefly, and later Yee offered him the script. Xie Xiaofeng, whom Lin was to play, is tired of killing and wants to disappear from a world where every new opponent knows his name. Lin spoke far more readily about that weariness than about how invincible the hero looks. But shooting the final duel between the two swordsmen took about twenty days. By his account, a double was rarely called for, and he collected his share of cuts and bruises. Over the next two years, Tsui Hark cast him as Sun Wukong in Journey to the West: The Demons Strike Back and brought him back as Shatuo in Detective Dee and Four Heavenly Kings.

In Princess Agents (2017), Lin played Yuwen Yue, who teaches the heroine Zhao Li-Ying the very things that will later help her break away from him. Relatives, by his account, seriously asked him how his story would end. That same year, photographs appeared in the press showing Lin and actress Claudia Wang Li-Kun traveling in Japan together with Mark Chao You-Ting and Gao Yuan-Yuan. The trip was taken as evidence of a romance, though Lin's team gave no substantive response. In 2018 his private life was in the news again when a hospital record marked as married surfaced online. The studio called the mark an error, and Lin himself at the time also denied being married.

In the years since Princess Agents, Lin wanted to try characters whom viewers encounter in everyday life. In Please Call Me Director (2022), he played Lu Jiming, a boss accustomed to having the last word and hard-pressed to imagine that his assistant might want a career of her own. Lin said that he himself finds it easier to admit his mistakes than this man does, and that he now takes more interest in tackling such grown-up roles. Yet he also returned to fantasy. In the series The Legend of Shen Li (与凤行, 2024), Lin and Zhao Li-Ying acted together again, and Lin was given two incarnations of his hero at once: the deity Xingzhi and the mortal Xingyun.

That same year saw the release of the series The Story of Rose (玫瑰的故事). Fang Xie-wen, Lin's character, and the girl played by Crystal Liu (Liu Yi-Fei) begin with the simplest student life: they read, take part-time jobs and look after a cat. Later, when Fang marries her, he finds it increasingly hard to tolerate his wife's independence. In interviews, Lin said that behind Fang's urge to run other people's lives he saw, above all, insecurity. Even when the character runs into trouble with his own business and his wife says outright that she is staying by his side not for the money, he cannot accept her support. Lin admitted that he found it hard to sympathize with Fang. In this project he had to play both a young man in whom the heroine finds sympathy after breaking up with her first love, and a husband who never understands what she herself wants from life.