Mark Chao You-Ting 趙又廷
Mark Chao won a Golden Bell for his debut series Black & White, played the young Detective Dee for Tsui Hark, and rose to fame on the mainland with Eternal Love. On screen he has happily shifted between personas. For Lu Chuan he re-recorded his lines several times, from Lou Ye he learned to hold a long pause, and in Her Story he himself asked to be given the role of a man still hoping to win back his ex-wife.
Mark Chao was born in Taiwan in 1984. His father, Chiu Shu-Hoi, performed on stage and worked in television. At twelve, Mark moved to Canada with his mother and brother. His father asked the boys to help her while they found their feet in a foreign country. Mark later said that ever since then he had grown used to noticing for himself what needed doing at home. He grew up and studied in Victoria, Canada, and when he decided to return to Taiwan and become an actor, his mother was not especially pleased. She knew the profession well from her husband's work and agreed to give her son two years to try.
In Black & White (2009), Chao was immediately given one of the two lead roles. His Wu Ying-Hsiung serves in the police and is used to speaking his mind, while his partner finds a workaround where Wu is still only looking for a formal grounds for action. In such a duo, Chao could show that his character's honesty and stubbornness sometimes grow out of the very same unwillingness to listen to another person. For his first television role he received Taiwan's Golden Bell Award. Already the following year, in Doze Niu's Monga, Chao played a youth who finds comrades in a street gang. The film was shot about an old district of Taipei. His character feels for the first time that he matters to someone, and so for a long while fails to see what his new friends are drawing him into. Chao recalled that for all his good fortune, the hardest time was precisely at the start of his career, when people already expected something of him while he himself still had a poor idea of what roles he wanted to play.
One of his first major jobs on the mainland was with Chen Kaige. In Caught in the Web, Chen showed what happens when a bus quarrel filmed on a phone becomes public property. Chao worked alongside the actress Gao Yuan-Yuan, who played the woman the whole city proceeds to judge after that video. In 2014 they married. On screen, by that time Chao had also appeared as Chen Xiaozheng in Vicki Zhao's So Young, a student who will later choose career over a relationship, and as a novice detective in Tsui Hark's Young Detective Dee: Rise of the Sea Dragon. Chao later returned to the role of Dee in Hark's next film, Detective Dee and Four Heavenly Kings. For him it was a rare case where the hero is already familiar from the first picture and there is still a chance to play how those around him begin to see a completely different person in him.
He met Lu Chuan by chance. Before shooting Chronicles of the Ghostly Tribe, Chao read the novel about Hu Bayi and decided that the adventurer was nothing like him. The film had long scenes that required precisely measuring movement and speech. One shot of about three minutes was filmed over two days, and only partly made it into the final cut. After finishing the shoot, Chao was still going back to his lines in Mandarin. According to him, they had to be re-recorded five or six times. In the English-language The Warriors Gate he also had to watch his pronunciation: Chao spoke with a Canadian accent, while the director wanted an American one. On that shoot the actor also broke a rib when, during a jump, a rigid scabbard caught on the ground. After the break, the crew was saved by close-ups and scenes where he could move slowly.
In 2017, Chao played Ye Hua, heir to the heavenly throne, in Eternal Love. The first photographs of the character were met coolly. Chao himself doubted he was suited to the role of a man whom everyone in the series is supposed to immediately recognize as handsome, and he looked for what else about him might interest the viewer. He spoke of Ye Hua's loyalty and of how long this character is prepared to wait. The series became one of Chao's best-known works. In interviews he was now often asked about his family as well. He and Gao had a daughter growing up. In 2020, Chao said he was not bothered by the joking address "Mr. Gao Yuan-Yuan." He called his wife a friend with whom he could talk about work and whom he trusted.
Working with Lou Ye on Saturday Fiction, Chao had to get used to a very different way of shooting. The director once left the camera running for about thirty-five minutes. The actors went through their prepared lines twice, then carried on with the scene in their own words. Chao remembered his surprise at discovering that nothing terrible happens during a pause and that the camera can keep rolling while he says nothing. In the office series Ping Fan De Rong Yao, by contrast, he wanted certain things about his character to be immediately visible. He asked for a belly and a receding hairline, but the producers refused. He went on to work in stories about people who come into the office every day, including The Ideal City.
In Her Story (2024), Shao Yi-Hui first suggested that Chao play a doctor. He preferred the role of Wang Tiemei's ex-husband. He would rather look after the home, but at some point decides he is obliged to build a career and live the way a man, in his view, ought to. After the divorce he reads about feminism and tries to convince his ex-wife that he now understands her. Before shooting, Chao also read the books the director recommended. He said he wanted to preserve his character's tenderness toward his wife, even when, in his eagerness to please her, the man starts saying funny and inappropriate things. In his view, the ex-husband truly changes only at the moment when he is ready to leave Tiemei the right to decide whom she will live with.
