Li Guang-Jie 李光洁
Audiences first noticed Li Guang-Jie as the young Emperor Guangxu in the series For the Sake of the Republic of China. He was still studying acting at the time, and years later he would call that shoot his real school. In A Story of Lala's Promotion he was remembered for his role as a charming sales director, while in The Wandering Earth he played a rescue team commander whose harshness sparked debate. After the premiere, Li said that in the script his Wang Lei had an entire family history. Almost all of it stayed off screen, yet it was precisely from that history that the actor worked when deciding how to play this man.
Li Guang-Jie was born on April 23, 1981, in Pingdingshan, Henan Province, and grew up in a coal-mining district. His father worked at a coal mine for nearly thirty years, and his mother worked in a warehouse. At school Li eagerly took part in amateur performances and dreamed of becoming a presenter. When he decided to study acting, his father, by his recollection, spent a whole night thinking about what might come of it and in the morning said he would support him. Li graduated from the Henan Art School and, on its recommendation, entered the Central Academy of Drama in Beijing. The Xinjingbao gives 1999 as the year of admission. A Jiaoren publication names 1996, but 1999 agrees with Li's recollection that in 2001 he was in his second year. While he was studying, the mine where his parents worked closed. Li tried to earn a scholarship and, as he told the Xinjingbao in an interview, at the start of each term he exchanged two-thirds of his money for canteen meal vouchers so that he would not accidentally spend it.
Looking for work, he went around the Beijing hotels where film crews usually stayed and handed out his photographs with his phone number on the back. By his later recollection, in 2001 Li was still a student when he went through three auditions with director Zhang Li and won the role of Guangxu in the series For the Sake of the Republic of China. The series came out in 2003, when Li had graduated from the academy. A 2003 report in the Meiri Xinbao, however, calls the series Li's first work after graduation. During his first three months with the crew he read the books he had been given and wrote a biography of his character. On Zhang Li's advice, before lunch he would call on Lu Zhong, who played the Dowager Empress Cixi, and escort her arm in arm to the canteen. That was how he got used to staying close to her on screen. In an interview published while the series was first airing, Li explained that he saw the emperor as a man who had resolved on reform but, after clashes with Cixi, gradually lost his confidence.
He also appeared for Zhang Li in Jun Ren Ji Mi, and a few years later turned to him for advice when he was offered a role in The Mission (2007). He had never had such a big role before. His character Gong Xiangguang, an underground operative who has led a double life for years, appears in more than a thousand scenes. Li doubted he could handle it and agreed only after talking with the director. That same year the Rome festival screened Gu Chang-Wei's And the Spring Comes, one of Li's first film roles. He played Huang Sibao, a provincial artist who fails the entrance exams for the Beijing Academy of Fine Arts again and again. Huang is loved by a singing teacher who also dreams of moving to the capital. As played by Li, Huang is proud and quick to take offense, even with the one person who understands what each rejection costs him.
On the set of Mi Ling 1949 (2005) Li met the actress Hao Lei. According to Hao Lei, they registered their marriage in August 2006. Some later publications give 2007. Li publicly called Hao Lei his wife in May 2008. In December, when they were paired again in the series When Love Has Gone, both confirmed that they had been married for two years. In the spring of 2009 Li told journalists that they were planning a wedding banquet. In June Hao Lei announced that since mid-April they had been living apart. By then photographs of Li with a woman unknown to the public had appeared in the press. Sohu and other outlets wrote of a possible affair, while Hao Lei said outright that the photographs had nothing to do with their breakup. By December 2009, when Li spoke about the separation in a Sohu interview, the divorce had already been finalized. Later, in a television interview, he explained that they simply were not right for each other.
In 2011 Li tried his hand at directing for the first time, making Blue Tears from his own script. It is a short film about a courier in a clown costume and a girl from a snack bar. The girl has not a single line. Li took up photography on the advice of Zhang Li. The director believed it was good for an actor to work with a camera himself in order to understand how his performance looks on screen. In 2012 one of Li's portraits was recognized in the Chinese stage of the National Geographic competition.
In 2013, with plenty of work, Li by his own admission lost confidence in himself. He decided to return to the stage, which he had not set foot on since his student years. In 2014 he played Romeo in Tian Qinxin's production, which transposed the Shakespeare story to an imaginary Chinese city where the residents of two neighborhoods are at war. Juliet was played by Yin Tao. The play premiered at the Hong Kong Arts Festival and was then taken on tour around China. In 2015 Li received Shanghai's Yi Drama Award for Best Actor for his Romeo.
In Hong Kong cinema Li has played both a policeman and a criminal. In Drug War (festival premiere in 2012, release in 2013) he played an officer of the anti-narcotics unit, and in Line Walker (2016) the head of a drug cartel. He played another boss with bad intentions in the comedy Hanson and the Beast (2017). His Yun Zhonghe makes sure that monsters do not reveal themselves among humans. As noted in the HKCinema review, this enforcer would most like to set the two worlds against each other.
In those years Li especially treasured the role of the scout Yang Zirong in Tracks in the Snowy Forest (2017). In China the story was known from the novel, the films and Peking opera, and audiences remembered by heart even the password the scout recites in the bandits' lair. Li reread the novel and rewatched every version he could find. He kept the familiar lines but played some scenes his own way. In the scene where Yang traditionally leaps onto the table, Li spoke the same words while jumping down from the table.
In The Wandering Earth (2019) by Frant Gwo, Li was given the role of Wang Lei, captain of a rescue team. According to the actor, the protective gear weighed more than forty kilograms, and he had to work in it for twelve hours at a stretch. When, after the premiere, audiences began to reproach Wang Lei for putting the mission above people, Li told China National Radio in an interview about scenes cut during editing. In the script the captain's wife and child were among those who drew no place in the underground cities. For his Wang Lei, completing the task meant giving their death at least some meaning. That same year Li played a teacher in the series Waiting For You In The Future. His character returns to the time of his own youth and becomes the homeroom teacher of his younger self.
In July 2019, Li announced that he had married actress Sui Yu-Meng, who had also studied at the Central Academy of Drama. In 2020 they had their first child, and in 2023 the couple announced the birth of their second. According to Li, it was only after becoming a father that he realized how much falseness there had been in his acting when he had played fathers before.
In The Wind Blows From Longxi (2022), Li played Zhuge Liang, and in Wild Bloom (2022) he played Zhao Lei, a manager at a foreign company who helps the heroine find her feet in the steel business of the 1990s. In the family drama Families in the Alley (小巷人家, 2024) he played the engineer Lin Wufeng. Reading the script, he immediately thought of his own father, who had let him choose his profession for himself. The hardest thing was getting used to the actor playing Lin's grown-up son. In the end Li decided to play opposite him as if he were still the same boy.
In 2026, for his role in Born to Be Alive, Li was nominated for the Golden Eagle television award for Best Supporting Actor. His Lin Peisheng heads a poor county on the Qinghai Plateau and hopes to lift it out of poverty through mining, while the local patrol tries to stop the poachers. Li said that he and the director went through every one of Lin's decisions — from his first attempts to help his county to the deals the official agrees to once things are going nothing like he had expected.
