Gina Jin Chen 金晨
When Shen Ao was shooting No More Bets, he asked Gina Jin to turn her head four seconds later in one take than in the previous one. She held the pause exactly as required, then did the same thing again with a five-second delay. The director attributed such precision to her dance training. Jin spent many years preparing for a career as a dancer and came to the set as an adult. Viewers first remembered her from costume dramas, and her most notable film work became the role in Shen Ao's picture, where her character falls into the hands of the organizers of an underground online casino.
Gina Jin was born on September 5, 1990, in Jinan, Shandong Province, into a Hui family. Both of her parents taught dance. Her older sister studied to play the guzheng, and her parents hoped the younger daughter would also choose an easier pursuit. Her father took her to the Palace of Young Pioneers and let her sign up for any club except dance. The girl still came to watch the dance classes through the window. Her parents gave in, and from about the age of six she was already studying dance. She left for Shanghai as a child and lived there at a dance school. In the dormitory, the teachers would occasionally check whether the students were hiding food. According to Jin, away from home she withdrew into herself and for a long time made almost no friends.
At the Beijing Dance Academy, Jin studied in the Chinese folk dance department. In 2008 she took part in the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, and the following year she received an award at the Taoli Cup competition for performing a Dai dance, Flowers, which she choreographed herself. She expected to become a professional dancer. As Jin recounted, even during her studies doctors warned her that her heart handled such exertion poorly. Even so, she kept dancing at every opportunity. In 2011, Jin and Hong Kong actor Chris Lai won the third season of the television competition Dance Miracle (舞动奇迹). By that time Jin had already appeared in her first series, Qi Zhong Wu Qi Zhi Kong Que Ling, in which she played Hou Jian.
Her first years on set were hard for her. Jin recalled that at first she did not even understand instructions about where the camera should begin and end its movement, and her colleagues rarely had time to go through a scene with her. Gradually she grew used to the pace of filming. Widespread fame came in 2015 with the series Wu Xin The Monster Killer. Jin played a village girl named Li Yueya who travels together with an immortal monster hunter. Jin recalled how, in the scene where Wu Xin confesses his love to her character, she stood with her back to Elvis Han, listened, and simply could not stop crying. When fans began speculating about a romance between the actors, Jin said in an interview with Sohu that she and her co-star knew each other too well and were simply friends.
Her next character was the court schemer Wang Meilin in The Imperial Doctress (2016). Angry comments appeared under the actress's Weibo posts, and one distant relative, according to Jin, after watching decided that the actress had become just like her character in real life. Almost simultaneously came Legend of Nine Tails Fox, in which Jin played a kind fox. The actress enjoyed watching the same viewers try to reconcile two such different images. In August of that year she asked to terminate her contract with the Tangren agency, and in the spring of 2017 she went to court. A district court in Beijing upheld the contract, and in January 2018 her appeal was rejected. Jin said that during the dispute she received almost no filming offers for nearly a year. One of her next notable roles was that of a police squad officer in S.W.A.T. (2019) by Ding Sheng.
In 2020 Jin returned to the dance stage in the television show Sisters Who Make Waves (乘风破浪的姐姐), where the participants performed as members of pop groups. She made it to the final and later said that at first she always tried to stand at the edge, but over the course of the competition she learned to speak directly about what she wanted for herself. That same year she played the underground operative Shen Qinghe in Fearless Whispers and Shen Siyi in Dear Missy, in which her character, after a long estrangement, meets her school friend again, played by Li Yi-Tong. And in the series Falling into You (2022) she played a high jump coach.
In the thriller No More Bets (2023), Jin played the model Liang Anna, who responds to a job offer abroad and ends up in an establishment where she is forced to work as a croupier. Before filming, the actress studied material about scam centers in Southeast Asia and practiced dealing cards so that her hands would move with confidence. Shen Ao recalled that even for the first shot she had thought everything through, down to how her earrings would sway as she moved. Jin herself said that the hardest thing was to portray a woman who smiles at the camera and looks quite content with her life, even though she cannot leave. For the scenes after the failed escape, she tried to stay hungry and tired in order to convey Anna's state. For this role she was nominated for an award at the Changchun Film Festival.
In 2024, Chinese television aired the series South to North (南来北往) about railway workers' families. Jin played Ma Yan at different periods of her life – the heroine's story spans several decades. For one of the scenes, she had watched in advance how people danced in the 1970s and deliberately added a touch of awkwardness to her movements. At the very end of the year, the comedy Honey Money Phony was released. In it, Jin again starred opposite Sun Yang, her co-star from No More Bets. This time she played a woman deceived by her former lover, and he played a con artist helping her get her money back. In the spring of 2025, Jin joined the jury of the debut and second feature film competition at the Beijing International Film Festival.
In January 2026, reports appeared on Weibo that after a car accident Jin had allegedly fled the scene while her assistant posed as the driver. The police of the Keqiao district of Shaoxing reported that the accident occurred on March 16, 2025, when Jin tried to swerve around a dog that ran onto the road. There were three people in the car, and all suffered minor injuries. The actress injured her face and was taken to Shanghai for treatment. The assistant who remained at the scene did indeed identify himself as the driver. The police stated that they had found no evidence of insurance fraud and announced a review of the actions of the officers who handled the incident. Jin apologized and said that she had learned of her assistant's words only after surgery and had compensated for the damage herself. In August 2026, she performed at the opening of the Changchun Film Festival with a dance number about the history of the local film studio.
