Allen Ai Lun 艾伦
Allen Ai spent years performing with the Happy Mahua theater troupe before audiences began to recognize him from his film roles. He had the lead in the stage play Goodbye Mr. Loser, and in the film adaptation he played the simple-minded Da Chun — the role the public remembers him for. Two years later, Ai and Mary Ma played a boxer and a sports journalist who swap bodies in the comedy Never Say Die. He prepared for the part for four months, learning how to hold himself in the ring and studying how his co-star moved. And when Stanley Tong Gwai-Lai cast him in Vanguard opposite Jackie Chan, it turned out his knack for making audiences laugh in the middle of a fight would come in handy once again.
Allen Ai was born on April 10, 1983, in Beijing. His family, by his own account, consisted mainly of workers and accountants. His grandparents worked at a nuclear research center, where a New Year's concert was held every year. At one such evening the family took the stage together. His father played guitar, his grandmother played the triangle, his grandfather shook a maraca, and four-year-old Allen played the electronic piano. Later he studied piano and singing, and during school holidays he rented videotapes and watched everything in a row, from war films to horror movies.
He decided to apply to a drama school after a teacher came to his class to recruit students. His family went with him to the exam, and when he was accepted, his father borrowed money to pay for his studies. After four years of study, Ai applied to the Central Academy of Drama and the Beijing Film Academy. The first time, he was not admitted anywhere. A year later the film academy expanded its enrollment, and his scores were just enough. In 2003, having completed the first stage of the acting program, he handed out résumés to film crews. There was almost nothing to write about his work experience, so he set the rest of the text in larger type to make the page look filled. In the series Da Cuo Che and Moment in Peking he got small roles as a bodyguard and a clerk who delivers a telegram. In 2005 Ai returned to the film academy to continue his studies.
He first came to a small theater with the same folder of photos and résumés he had used to visit film crews. In a comedy staged by his acquaintances from the film academy, a role was found for him. Ai said that at first he did not understand why he had been hired: in life he was silent and had never considered himself funny. During rehearsals it turned out that with a completely serious face he could deliver such nonsense that the audience laughed. In 2006 Peng Da-Mo invited him to Happy Mahua. Ai later recalled watching the troupe's performers from the auditorium and studying how they carried themselves on stage. Lines and funny details were discussed by everyone together, and the actor had to do more than learn his role — he had to invent it during rehearsals.
In 2012 Happy Mahua performed for the first time at the CCTV New Year's Gala. In the sketch "Today's Happiness," Ai played a husband who persuades his friend to pass himself off as his unborn son, supposedly arrived from the future. His partners were Shen Teng and Huang Yang. The following year he performed at the gala again with the sketch "Small Matters of the Big City," in which he appeared alongside Chang Yuan and Wang Ning. By then he had hundreds of stage appearances behind him. When in 2015 Happy Mahua set about adapting the play Goodbye Mr. Loser for the screen, Ai asked Peng Da-Mo why he was once again being offered the role of the simpleton. In the play he had played Xia Luo himself, whose screen role went to Shen. The director assured him that he would find no other Da Chun. Ai agreed, and after the film's success audiences kept calling him by his character's name for a long time. It was precisely as Da Chun that the directors of the comedy Some Like It Hot (2016) noticed him and invited him to play Ai Mu.
Never Say Die (2017) became the first Happy Mahua film in which Ai played the lead. On stage he had already played Edison. Before shooting, he spent four months boxing and lost weight. He learned to portray a woman trapped in a fighter's body from Mary Ma Li. He watched how she got angry, how she picked up a glass, and carried these little things into the scenes where her character finds herself in Edison's body. With the director he discussed which gestures should be more restrained so that the performance would not turn into a caricature. To the HKCinema reviewer, Ai seemed not entirely convincing in the sports scenes, but he rated the comic duo with Ma highly. The film grossed over two billion yuan in China. In 2018 the role of Edison brought Ai the Golden Dragon for Best Actor at the Chinese Film Festival in Sydney. Ma was honored for her female role at the same festival.
By that time, Ai and Mary Ma had been working together for more than a decade, and the press had begun to speculate that he had long been in love with her. Ai would reply that he had known Ma well since the first theatre rehearsals, and joke that she was the only girl in their troupe back then — who else was he supposed to look at? He is married to the Happy Mahua actress Zhu Wei-Wei. In an interview with Jiemian, Ai recalled that when they married they lived in an eighteen-square-metre room in a single-storey house and took the bus to the theatre every day. In 2023, at an audience event in Chengdu, he said that they have two children.
In 2018, Ai appeared in two new comedies from his troupe — Hello, Mr. Billionaire and Hello, Mrs. Money. In The Human Comedy, released in 2019, he took the lead role of Pu Tong, a struggling DJ. Ai said that together with the director Sun Zhou he looked for simple ways to show how this man behaves at home. During one argument, the hero is about to answer his wife back, but the moment she starts speaking, he walks off without a word. His next notable work was Vanguard (2020) by Stanley Tong Gwai-Lai. Ai played Zhang Kaixuan, a reconnaissance specialist on an international security team. In one London scene he fights off several opponents in a kitchen, using a durian as a weapon. Tong choreographed the fights himself and wanted Ai to keep a comic tone in the action scenes.
In Advancing of ZQ (2023), Song Yang again gave him the lead. The two had known each other since their theatre days. In the second cast, Ai played the same roles as Song, and when Song began directing plays himself, Ai became one of his leading actors. His Zheng Qian is a programmer and the only member of the family without superpowers, yet the others can use their gifts only when he is near. The family's adversary was played by Shen Teng. That same year, in Lose to Win, Ai appeared as a basketball coach, and in 2026, in Busted Water Pipes, he played Luo Siji, who wanted to leave the family trade of tomb raiding. At an audience event, Ai said that what interested him in this character was precisely the desire to get out, even though the man still feels obliged to his family.
