Tan Zhuo 谭卓
Tan Zhuo rose to widespread fame in the summer of 2018. Some viewers remember her from the drama Dying to Survive, in which she played a nightclub dancer earning money for her daughter's treatment, while others know her from Story of Yanxi Palace, where she was cast as a hot-tempered imperial concubine in love with Kunqu opera. By that time Tan had already taken her films to the Cannes and Venice festivals, spent several seasons performing in an eight-hour play, and tried her hand at producing, helping to secure funding for an independent film.
Tan Zhuo was born on September 25, 1983. According to a widely circulated account cited by iQIYI, her hometown is Changchun. A 2018 profile in the magazine Sanlian Life Weekly names Shenyang instead. According to the magazine, her mother changed jobs several times, and the daughter had to move from one school to another. Later they settled in Beijing. Her mother continued to look after her even after she began acting. Tan herself took a long time to get used to calling herself an actress and, when asked about her work, would sometimes joke that she lived on her mother's money.
Tan graduated from the Shijiazhuang Art School, hosted radio programs in Shijiazhuang and read the news on television in Qinhuangdao. At first she enjoyed the work, but fairly soon she grew tired of reading other people's scripts on air. By her account, it was the rector of Hebei University who suggested she try the acting department. She liked the very idea of a job that would let her travel a lot. Tan played Yuan Dan in the series The Archive of Missing Persons, released in 2002, and later named working with Lou Ye as her first serious encounter with cinema. He saw her photograph, had an assistant invite her to a meeting and, after a short conversation, offered her a role in Spring Fever (2009). Tan played Li Jing, a garment factory worker who suspects that her lover has become involved with a man. At the time Lou Ye was banned from making films in China, and the crew worked in Nanjing without official permission. Spring Fever made it into the main competition at Cannes and won a prize for screenwriter Mei Feng. Tan recalled that on the red carpet she was so flustered that all she did was smile at the photographers.
After Cannes she spent several more years appearing mainly in small films. In Mr. Tree (2011) she was cast as Xiaomei, a deaf woman who marries a village eccentric. Preparing for the role, Tan attended a special school where she learned sign language. In Liu Shu's directorial debut Lotus (小荷, 2012) she played a teacher from a small town who leaves her school and tries to become a journalist in Beijing. Tan turned down her fee and helped raise money for the shoot, while her mother brought food for the crew. When the film was selected for the Venice Critics' Week competition, Tan wrote to journalists herself and invited them to the screening.
In 2013 Tan took the stage in Stan Lai's A Dream Like a Dream. The performance ran about eight hours, the audience sat in the middle of the hall, and the action unfolded around them. One of the central characters, the Shanghai courtesan Gu Xianglan, was played by three actresses at different stages of her life. Tan played her in her youth. The hardest scene for her was the one in which Gu Xianglan leaves her beloved and goes away with a count. At one rehearsal her partner pulled her by the hand, and she simply could not bring herself to turn to him. Tan said she only understood in the third year why her character had decided to leave. In those same years Tan spent almost a year in New York. There she studied English and acting, finishing her assignments on the subway on the way to class and spending Sundays in museums.
In film Tan was often given roles that lasted only a few scenes. In the black comedy Cock and Bull (2016) she played Ping, a girl from a provincial nightclub. In Wrath of Silence (2017) she was a sick woman whose son goes missing. Recalling that work, Tan said that with Lou Ye she acted on instinct, whereas here she could already imagine herself in the place of a mother who has lost a child. In End of Summer (2017) Tan was offered the part of a young teacher, but she chose the role of a schoolboy's mother who has to juggle household chores with work in an opera troupe. For the sake of a short aria she took three weeks of Shaoxing opera lessons.
In Wen Mu-Ye's drama Dying to Survive (2018), Tan's character is the mother of a girl with leukemia. Liu Sihui dances at a nightclub and helps the medicine peddler played by Xu Zheng find buyers for cheap Indian drugs. The dance in the film lasts about twenty seconds, and Tan spent roughly a month and a half learning it. In one interview she said it took almost two months, while her colleague Zhang Yu put it at a month. During rehearsals she injured her ankle. The film grossed over three billion yuan at the Chinese box office. That same July, Story of Yanxi Palace began airing. As Tan told the Hong Kong magazine Ming Pao Weekly, the producer initially saw her in a quieter role, but over lunch he heard her ordering food and decided she should play Consort Gao. Tan liked that Gao, for all her quarrelsome nature, is passionate about theater and sings beautifully. The actress took kunqu lessons so she could perform the opera scenes herself in the heavy headdress.
In November 2018, HKCinema reported that Tan had begun shooting a film about the Dalian fire. The Bravest, released in 2019, was based on real events. Tan played Li Fang, the wife of the fire brigade commander played by Huang Xiao-Ming. The scene in which she searches for her son in the crowd was shot at night in the Qingdao metro, after the trains had stopped running. That same year, in Sheep Without a Shepherd, she was cast as A Yu, a mother trying to shield her daughter from the investigation. One of the film's most discussed scenes was A Yu's conversation with the police chief, played by Joan Chen. Around that time a rumor spread that the two actresses had argued over the order of their names in the credits. In December 2019, Tan said in an interview with the Yuli studio that there had been no dispute and that the billing order had been agreed in the contract from the start. According to her, the producers had initially considered her for the police chief role as well, but in the end she was pleased with how the parts were distributed. For her role as A Yu, Tan was nominated for the Golden Rooster and the Hundred Flowers awards.
One of Tan's most notable television roles in the following years was Ding Meixi in Enemy (2021). Her character works as a teacher, raises a daughter and, together with her husband, engages in espionage. Acquaintances tried to talk Tan out of taking the series, doubting it would ever be shown, and when the pandemic kept pushing back the shoot, she still kept rearranging her schedule around it. The role earned her a nomination for Shanghai's White Magnolia Award in 2023, and in 2025 she received Beijing's Spring Swallow Award for the same part. In Shallow, first shown at the Shanghai International Film Festival in 2021 and released in Chinese cinemas in 2022, she played Bai Yang, a former athlete who returns to the ring. According to Tan, two hours of training a day seemed too little to her, so she switched to four. The film's director said that at first only an hour a day had been set aside for training. Tan herself asked that real athletes face her in the ring, and during the shooting of one of the fights she had a rib broken.
Tan rarely talks about her personal life. In 2019 she said she had long ago warned her mother that she might never marry. In April 2020, the newspaper Xindao Ribao repeated a rumor of her secret marriage that arose after paparazzi photographed the actress with a man and a little boy. Tan did not comment publicly on the rumor at the time. In a 2022 interview she mentioned that she has a son and said that since his birth she has become more patient.
In January 2024, her first solo exhibition opened at Beijing's Song Art Center. Among the works were video installations in which she tried to show how technology is changing our idea of the human being. At the end of that same year, in The Storm of Roses, Tan played Xie Linhui, the editor-in-chief of a financial publication. Here her experience in radio and television came in handy. She understood why her character demands that her staff distinguish in writing the three particles that sound identical in speech.
In the autumn of 2026, the series Song of the Skylark (云雀叫天录) was released, based on the story of a Peking opera master. Tan played Shen Yu'er, the artist's wife, who grew up in a theatrical family. She and her co-star portrayed the couple across different years, from youth to old age. The scenes were shot out of order, and in the middle of summer in Hengdian they had to put on winter clothes. In a September interview with The Paper, Tan named Shen Yu'er her favorite character and said that after this work she began attending Peking opera performances and taking her son along.
