Xin Zhilei 辛芷蕾

In Blossoms, Xin Zhilei plays the owner of a restaurant on Huanghe Road, where Shanghai businessmen close deals over dinner. By that time, Wong Kar-Wai had already seen her in Brotherhood of Blades 2 and, as the actress recalled, remembered the look in her character's eyes during a duel. By the series premiere, Xin Zhilei had already made her stage debut with a two-hour one-woman show. And in 2025, in Venice, she was awarded the Volpi Cup for the drama The Sun Rises on Us All, in which she played a woman who has lived for many years with the thought that another person paid for her deed.

Xin Zhilei was born in Hegang, Heilongjiang Province, the eldest of three children in a working-class family. She was named Xin Lei at birth. HKCinema and most reference profiles give her date of birth as April 8, 1986, while one Sina article names February 1986. Even as a schoolgirl she worked part-time as a waitress. She began sewing with dresses for dolls, and after school she went to Harbin to study fashion design. A representative of Donnie Yen Ji-Dan's team spotted her at the local television station where she was working part-time. Her father was paralyzed by then, the family needed money, and she agreed to sign a contract, gave up her studies and moved to Guangzhou.

Her very first commercial paired her with Tony Leung Chiu-Wai. By her own account, she decided things would take off from there, but for the next three years she struggled to land even bit parts. She sent half the money the company paid her to her mother. She studied acting on a six-month course at the Central Academy of Drama. The first entry in her HKCinema filmography is the series Shooting from Behind (2010), while biographies more often name her role in the television Painted Skin (2011) as her debut. Her early films included horror pictures. She played the lead in Haunting Love (2012), and a year later Bi Xian II was released, in which she appeared for Korean director Ahn Byeong-Ki. One of her first major television roles was in the family drama The Moon Embracing the Sun from the Star (2015). She played her character Xia Mingyue both as a teenager and past thirty.

According to the director, shooting on Crosscurrent began in January 2012; some publications give 2011 as the start of filming. On learning she would have to dive into the Yangtze, Xin Zhilei assured the director that she was a good swimmer, though by her own account until then she had felt confident only in a shallow pool. Her An Lu meets a cargo ship captain at different points along the way to the river's source and grows younger each time. In interviews the actress linked the work on the film to her grief after the deaths of her father and grandfather. In one of her accounts both deaths are placed before the shoot. The film was released only in 2016 and made it into the main competition at Berlin, where cinematographer Mark Lee Ping-Bing won a Silver Bear for outstanding artistic contribution.

In Brotherhood of Blades 2 (2017), Lu Yang gave her the role of Ding Baiying, a master of saber fighting. Before shooting the actors trained in Tai'erzhuang eight hours a day. Xin Zhilei especially remembered the duel in the bamboo grove, where her character cuts the blade of Chang Chen's hero in two with a single stroke. She had long wanted to appear in a wuxia film, and several years later it was precisely this role that caught the interest of Wong Kar-Wai.

That same autumn she took part in the television competition The Birth of an Actor (演员的诞生). Having lost to Jennifer Shu Chang, Xin Zhilei said in an interview that her rival had not acted all that well. The clip spread online, and the actress was accused of being a bad loser. Jury member Song Dan-Dan later wrote that she may have made a mistake when voting. Speaking to Sina, Xin Zhilei admitted she had spoken too heatedly and said that Jennifer Shu Chang deserved the win. By her account, she had been comparing her rival's performance with what she had seen at rehearsal, and the harshest part of her answer was what made it to air.

The following year, audiences saw her in several notable series at once. In Ruyi's Royal Love in the Palace she played the concubine Jin Yuyan, who for years plays her own game at court, and in the series Mr. Right she was Gu Yao, a woman dealing with her husband's infidelity. Preparing for the shoot, Xin Zhilei questioned acquaintances who had lived through infidelity and wrote a biography of Gu Yao for herself. And the role of Haitang Dodo in Joy of Life (2019) she asked the director for herself. When she was told the part was that of a "holy maiden," she pictured a prim beauty in white robes and nearly turned it down. In the script, though, she read about a woman who fights beautifully, lives as she pleases and happily potters about in the vegetable garden.

In Dante Lam's The Rescue (2020), Xin Zhilei played helicopter pilot Fang Yuling. Before filming, the actors were taught to escape from the water and pull people out, and on flights, she recalled in an interview with The Paper, everyone brought along bags in case they felt sick. In the script, Fang was supposed to easily outswim the commander. Try as she might, Xin Zhilei could not get past her partner, and Lam rewrote the scene right there on set.

In Blossoms (2023), Wong Kar-Wai filmed her for three years. She played Li Li, who arrives in Shanghai in the early 1990s and opens a restaurant on Huanghe Road. Xin Zhilei talked with a woman who ran a restaurant there in those years and took lessons in tango and Latin American dances to change her posture and gait. From the endless walks in heels, she recalled, blisters appeared on her feet. The script kept changing as they went along, and, by her account, all three lead actresses only learned how their characters' relationships with Bao turned out when the series aired. For Li Li she received the China Media Group award for acting breakthrough of the year.

Even before the series came out, Xin Zhilei acted on stage for the first time. In June 2023, Shanghai hosted the premiere of the Chinese version of Suzie Miller's one-woman play Prima Facie (初步举证). She played Tessa, a criminal defense lawyer who, after being raped herself, has to testify in court. Over two hours, Xin Zhilei managed to play more than twenty characters, Tessa among them. She learned the text on the go, climbing the stairs and repeating the pages she had marked to learn that day. In the spring of 2024, she received Shanghai's White Magnolia theatre award for this production in the leading roles category.

That same year she played a courier's wife in the drama Upstream and the older sister of a famous actress in The Unseen Sister, which was selected for the competition of the Tokyo International Film Festival. For The Unseen Sister, both performers, who grew up in northern China, learned the Yunnan dialect and, at the director's request, tried to speak it even between takes.

Talk about Xin Zhilei's personal life began back in 2018, when she was seen several times together with actor Zhai Tian-Lin. In April 2024, a rumor spread online that they had registered their marriage in Qingdao. The actress's staff member publicly called it a fabrication. In October of that same year, blogger Liu Dachui said he had seen Zhai with another woman and suggested the actors had split up. Xin Zhilei's assistant responded by asking the public to take more interest in the actress's work. Xin Zhilei herself has never spoken publicly about the romance.

In Cai Shang-Jun's drama The Sun Rises on Us All (2025), Xin Zhilei played Zeng Meiyun, the owner of a clothing shop in Guangzhou who meets a former lover, a man who once served time in prison for her sake. She was suggested for the part by screenwriter Han Nianjin, who had seen Xin Zhilei on a travel reality show. Memories of student trips to buy fabric came in handy while working on the role. Xin Zhilei remembered how the women who ran the stalls would gulp down lunch perched on stools so they could get back to their customers sooner. She came up with the idea that Meiyun carries two bags so that her keys and other small items don't get lost among her things. On September 6, 2025, she received the Volpi Cup for Best Actress for this work. In November, when the film was released in China, she came to Hegang to present it. Outside the cinema she was met by former classmates who had made it to the screening after work.

In 2026, Xin Zhilei played a lawyer again, this time in the TV series The Inner Eye. In June she joined the main competition jury of the Shanghai International Film Festival, which was headed by Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, her co-star in that commercial from long ago. In July, the China Film Directors' Guild named her actress of 2025 for her role as Meiyun.