Du Jiang 杜江
Du Jiang was already well known for family TV shows when he played a sapper in Operation Red Sea. Yet his own son, who appeared with Du on television, failed to recognize his father on the big screen. For his role as deputy commander of a naval special forces unit, Du won the Hundred Flowers Award, and soon afterward The Bravest and The Chinese Pilot hit the screens. For the first film he trained with firefighters, and before the second he questioned the pilot whose crew managed to land the plane after the cockpit lost pressure.
Du Jiang was born on September 10, 1985. In an interview with Xinjingbao, Jinan in Shandong Province was named as his birthplace. Du himself also calls Jinan his hometown, though the Qingdao press has a different version — Qingdao. His father was a civil servant and his mother taught at a university. According to Du's recollections, his father was strict and taciturn. His mother helped him choose his profession. In his senior year of high school, she suggested he try applying to the acting department. He had about a month to prepare. He learned a song and a prose passage, and since he had never studied dance, he prepared a set of gymnastic exercises instead of a dance. In 2004, Du was admitted to the Shanghai Theatre Academy.
At first he had only a vague idea of how he would live after his studies, and he became seriously interested in the profession only once at the academy. From his second year, he and his classmates shot commercials on weekends so as not to miss classes. He got his first roles before he graduated from the academy in 2008. In the series Rich Man Poor Love, he played Hao Liang, the heroine's first love. He made his film debut in Empire of Silver (2009), a family saga about the owners of a banking house. After receiving his diploma, Du moved to Beijing. There was little shooting in the first years, and on his days off he often simply went off to play ball. One of his first notable works was the series Green Porcelain (2012). His Xu Yi learns to do business from the husband of his aunt, played by Wang Zhi-Wen, and then becomes his rival. Du explained that in the first scenes he drew on his habit of behaving respectfully toward his elders — it even suggested his posture and intonation to him. The more independently Xu Yi acts, the more convinced he is that he has mastered all his mentor's tricks. And that is where he stumbles.
Du met the actress Huo Siyan through friends in 2012. He had known of her long before they met. Back in the dormitory, a roommate had hung a poster for the film My Name Is Fame, in which she appeared, opposite Du's bed. For their first date, Du and Huo went to an exhibition in Beijing's 798 art district. In 2013 they registered their marriage, and on September 19 their son Du Yuqi was born, nicknamed Enheng at home. In 2019, Huo said that she was already pregnant when they registered and that they never did hold a wedding. The couple also appeared on screen together. Du recalled that in Cao Mao Jing Cha (2014), Huo had romantic scenes, and he, sitting behind the monitor, pretended to be busy playing on his phone, though in fact he was closely watching the shoot.
In 2015, Du and his year-and-a-half-old son became regular participants in the second season of the TV show “Dad Came Back” (爸爸回来了). Before that, Du had never stayed alone with his son for so long. The cameras filmed him coping with ordinary household chores, and after the show aired, people at airports began approaching father and son to ask for a photo. Sometimes they wanted a photo only with his son, and Du recounted this with pleasure. Two years later, they appeared together in the fifth season of the show “Where Are We Going, Dad?” (爸爸去哪儿).
Meanwhile, he also began to be offered more prominent roles in film. In the comedy Mr. High Heels (2016), Du plays a timid programmer who poses as a model to get closer to a girl. Shoes in his size had to be found in Thailand. As Du recalled, over the course of filming he wore out five or six pairs. That same year, in The Wasted Times, he played a young gangster whom, after a shootout, Huo Siyan's character hides and nurses back to health. Du's favorite scene was the one where they simply sit at a table and eat while sunlight falls through the window onto Huo's dress.
When Du heard that Dante Lam was preparing to shoot Operation Red Sea (2018), he put himself forward for the role. The director was already scouting locations in Morocco, so the two talked over a video call. A few days later Lam told Du to get ready for hard work. Du was cast as Xu Hong, a bomb disposal expert and deputy commander of the Jiaolong assault team. He trained with a coach ahead of the shoot, and in Morocco he kept going to the gym even after a day of filming. There he discovered that holding a real weapon at arm's length was far heavier than he had imagined. Du recalled how, in the first combat scene, he and Zhang Yi had to fire simultaneously at the people behind a glass door. Lam asked them not to blink at the sound of the gunshot. Du pulled it off, and the director was pleased. The film became the highest-grossing in China in 2018, and for this role Du won the Hundred Flowers Award for Best Supporting Actor.
That same year Du played the husband of the heroine in Iwai Shunji's Last Letter. He had met the director several years before the shoot, when a friend who knew how much Du loved Iwai's films invited him to a meeting. Reading the script, Du simply could not understand what Zhihua saw in his character, and in conversations on set he tried to work out how the man behaved at home, with his family. In 2019 Du played Shen Hao in the family drama So Long, My Son. That same year saw the release of two films for which Du studied the work of firefighters and pilots. In Tony Chan's The Bravest he played Ma Weiguo, commander of a firefighting unit. The film was based on the 2010 fire at an oil terminal in Dalian. The actors trained alongside firefighters for about a hundred days. According to the director, one of the scenes was shot amid real flames. When Du began to struggle for breath, filming was stopped, but for another week he coughed and spoke hoarsely. Chan kept his voice in the film exactly as it had sounded on set.
In Andrew Lau's The Chinese Pilot Du was cast as relief captain Liang Dong. As HKCinema reported back at the start of shooting, the film was based on the incident involving Sichuan Airlines flight 3U8633. The cockpit windshield shattered in mid-flight, and the crew made an emergency landing in Chengdu. The pilots were played by Zhang Han-Yu and Oho Ou. Du questioned the real-life prototype of his character, the pilot Liang Peng, about how, after the impact, he had made his way from the cabin back to the cockpit. What stuck with Du most was one detail of his account — on the way to the cockpit Liang thought that both of his comrades might already be dead. On ordinary flights his colleagues knew Liang as a very different man. He loved to joke and took pleasure in flying, and Du tried to convey that in the film.
In February 2022 a video appeared on social media with screenshots of messages that Du Jiang had sent to one user. His request to keep the correspondence secret was interpreted as an attempt to hide a personal interest. Du responded that he had approached users as part of a project about Wuhan landmarks, and that he had asked to keep the correspondence secret to avoid misunderstandings. His studio stated that other people had received such messages as well. Huo Siyan said publicly that she believed her husband.
Du returned to firefighters in Flash Over (2023). This time he played Han Kai, a signalman relaying information to headquarters from the site of an explosion at a chemical plant. For the film he again had to train with firefighters, learn to handle hoses, descend on a rope and carry out the injured. For Operation Leviathan (2025) Dante Lam once again called on Du to play Xu Hong, this time for filming aboard a submarine. The team built a full-scale mock-up of the submersible, and the actor took up underwater diving. In one training exercise he had to find, underwater and with his eyes closed, the gear that had been taken off him and restore his air supply. Each time he earned another diving certificate, Du would send Lam a photograph, and Lam would reply with a thumbs-up.
