Johnny Huang Jing-Yu 黄景瑜
Johnny Huang has played so many soldiers and cops that the Chinese press jokingly calls him an actor who serves his tour of duty on set. It all began with Gu Shun, the cocky sniper in Operation Red Sea. Huang played him at twenty-four and won the Asian Film Awards prize for best newcomer for the role. And in Han Han's Pegasus, he landed the part of a young racer whom Shen Teng's character tries to beat on the track. When Huang came to watch the Chinese Grand Prix in Shanghai, the grandstand called out to him by his character's name.
Huang Jing-Yu was born on November 30, 1992, in Dandong, Liaoning Province. His father was a driver, his mother an accountant. His paternal grandfather served in the army. As a child, Huang himself also wanted to be a soldier, and specifically to join the special forces. He was the youngest among his cousins and recalled that his grandparents spoiled him. At sixteen he left Dandong. As Huang told The Paper, he rode the train to Shanghai alone for more than thirty hours. He had no particular plan at the time — he simply wanted to see what lay beyond his hometown.
In Shanghai he worked as a waiter and a radio editor, and got into modeling at the suggestion of acquaintances. He crisscrossed the city to auditions by metro and skateboard. On shoots for an online store he was paid five or six yuan per item. In a day Huang could try on as many as three hundred garments, and then sit without work for a whole month. In those same years he took up Brazilian jiu-jitsu. At first, by his own account, he trained for self-defense, then began competing and kept training even after he started acting. In 2019 he received a purple belt.
In the autumn of 2015 a friend wrote to Huang that Beijing was looking for actors for a series. Huang first assumed it was some kind of scam, but he made inquiries, boarded a train and got the role the same day after his audition. In Addicted (2016) he played Gu Hai, the son of a military man. Defying his father, Gu Hai transfers to an ordinary school and there falls in love with a classmate. At the time Huang's greatest fear was that he would torment the crew with endless takes. He had no acting training, and here he was required to carry a leading role. In January the series began streaming online, and in February, after the twelfth episode, it was pulled from Chinese platforms. The creators posted the remaining episodes on YouTube. In that short time Huang gained an audience beyond mainland China as well — by the end of the year he was already traveling to Taiwan for a fan meeting.
After the series' success Huang was still going to modeling auditions and shooting for his old rate. In 2016 he played a courier in a cameo in MBA Partners, as well as one of the lead roles in the black comedy Guns and Kidneys, which at the time never made it to release. In an interview with Xinjing Bao, Huang recalled how lost he felt on set. He did not know where to stand or what to do with his hands, while his co-star Wang Qian-Yuan could chat with him until the director called action and the next second already speak and move like his character. Huang himself only found his footing after about three weeks.
In Morocco, where Dante Lam was shooting Operation Red Sea (2018), the actors went through military training in the morning and hit the gym in the evening. Huang recalled that it took two days just to learn to draw a pistol. Later he trained separately with a sniper rifle. In practice he could lie down calmly and steady his breathing, but on set he had to do the same thing right after a run, a climb up a hill or a zip-line jump between buildings. When Gu Shun lies in ambush, his face is barely visible. Huang and Lam came up with the idea of giving him chewing gum — from the way he chews, you can tell whether he is calm or nervous. At first Gu Shun looks down on his partner, played by Yin Fang — the man has less experience, though the sniper cannot do without his eyes. The film grossed over 3.6 billion yuan in China. Huang was nominated for the Hundred Flowers Award as Best Newcomer, and in the spring of 2019 he received the award in the same category at the Asian Film Awards in Hong Kong.
That same year, 2018, saw the release of the series Moonshine and Valentine, in which Huang played Helan Jingting, a priest of the fox clan who cannot see by day and has spent several centuries meeting the same woman in different lifetimes. As he told The Paper, on that shoot tears sometimes welled up in his eyes the moment he saw his co-star cry. For the role of Helan he was given the Huading Award as Best Actor in a contemporary-themed series.
In Han Han's Pegasus (2019), Huang played Lin Zhendong, the reigning rally champion whom Zhang Chi (Shen Teng), back in the sport, sets out to challenge. The director himself used to compete in rallying and before shooting took Huang around a course in Xinjiang, showing him when to shift gear and how to spin the car with the handbrake. Behind the wheel Huang is so calm it looks as though he truly has no reason to worry. Lin treats his rival with respect and even helps him with the car. Huang plays him perfectly straight, and the comedy is all the better for it. After a cameo in Pegasus 2 (2024), Huang played Lin again in Pegasus 3 (2026), where the former rivals race for the same team.
On television Huang has become typecast as a policeman. In The Thunder (2019), inspired by an operation against an underground drug-manufacturing ring in Guangdong, Huang played Li Fei, a young officer in the narcotics unit. The director Fu Dong-Yu asked him to keep the image of Don Quixote in mind – Li Fei charges ahead and often acts alone because he doesn't know which of his own people he can trust. His impatience is especially noticeable beside the characters of Wu Gang and Simon Yam, men used to waiting years for their moment.
Huang then spent several years alternating such roles with work in melodramas. In Wild Grass (2020) he played Wu Feng, a small-town boy who moves to the big city and grows attached to his neighbour. In an interview with Forbes China, Huang said that Wu Feng is simple-hearted and sincere in his feelings for his friends and his neighbour. In Ace Troops (2021) Huang played Gao Liang – viewers follow his service from the early 1980s. In Chasing the Undercurrent (2022) he was once again investigating a criminal gang, and in Bright Eyes in the Dark (2023) he commanded firefighters. In Formed Police Unit (2024) he played Yu Weidong, the commander of a peacekeeping police squad. In an interview with the portal 1905, Huang said that when dressing down his subordinates on screen he sometimes pictured his former self in their place.
Talk of his relationship with the artist Wang Yuxin began in November 2018. A Weibo user under the handle "凹凸不平up" posted personal photos of the couple and claimed they had married in secret and then divorced. He accused Huang of cheating and abuse, citing photographs and medical documents. On 4 November the actor's studio stated that the couple had parted amicably, rejected the abuse allegation and called the posts slander. In February 2023, as Taiwan's TVBS reported, Wang showed on a livestream where in Alipay one can check marriage and divorce certificates. She did not make the documents themselves public. In June the studio again stated that the breakup had been amicable and rejected the accusations of cheating and abuse. Huang called Wang a close person and a friend, and she wrote that they had remained friends and asked people to stop spreading false reports.
Huang played another narcotics officer in The First Shot (2024), produced by Zhang Yi-Mou. The story is set in northeast China in 1997. Zheng Bei's parents run a small eatery, and he speaks to his colleagues in the northeastern dialect that Huang has known since childhood. In Our Dazzling Days (2026) the actor returned to the northeast of the 1990s, only this time his character is Zhang Xiaoman, an orphan raised by the whole factory settlement. The director recalled that already on the second day of shooting they filmed the scene in which Xiaoman, after his grandmother's death, comes to eat at the neighbours'. No scenes with the grandmother had been shot by then, and Huang had to play the boy's grief at a stranger's table without a single line.
