Rachel Liu Jing-Yi 刘静怡
At an audition for a film that was supposed to be released in theaters, the director looked at Rachel Liu Jing-Yi's résumé and said he hadn't even seen many of her works. "I haven't seen yours either," she replied, as she later recounted. By that time, Liu had already played the lead in three parts of Poker Queen. Her character, an undercover agent, was equally at home at the card table and in a fight. Liu entered the profession just as Chinese video services were first venturing into feature-length films. Web films gave her work and an audience, and along the way a reputation that has followed her into auditions ever since.
Liu Jing-Yi was born in Beijing. Biographical records give her date of birth as 5 January 1991, although in May 2011 she described herself as nineteen in an interview with Sina Games. Liu studied at North China University of Technology and began appearing in computer game commercials while still a student. She joined the "Network Genesis" guild in early March 2011, and by the summer she had been invited to portray the catwoman from the online game "Menghuan Kunlun." Later, in an interview with the gaming site 17173, she recalled spending half a day trying to catch a white fox cub in the game. The cub never got caught, but a panda — the game's mascot — dropped from a chest for her instead. In photo-shoot features she was introduced under the English name Rachel, and the nickname Sexycat eventually became part of her Weibo handle.
That same year, 2011, Liu appeared in the eight-minute melodrama If Love, made for MSN. In 2012 the horror film Who in the Mirror opened in cinemas. It was based on the scare story that at midnight you can see a ghost in the mirror if you peel an apple without ever breaking the skin. In parallel, Liu tried her hand at pop music. In July 2013 she performed as part of ChinaQueen at the launch of the group Charming Lady's first mini-album at a shopping mall in Beijing's Shijingshan district. That same year Sina Games was still writing about her as a model who had appeared in an Infiniti commercial and turned up at gaming expos in the costumes of her characters.
Liu got her first roles through auditions. In an interview with ELLEMEN she recalled trying to learn to swim in four days before shooting her first web film. They were filming on a soundstage with a pool about four metres deep, and she did eventually get into the water. In Maid Cafe she played the feisty Lin Qin, who wants to get rich and instantly loses interest in a leading film role once she learns she will have to act for free. In Original Girl she was cast as the student Xiao Mei, whose life is wrecked by a rumour of an affair with a teacher. For that role Liu was nominated for a Golden Web Award as Best Actress.
The three parts of Poker Queen came out between August and October 2016. Lisa Wang, Liu's character, infiltrates the world of underground poker, where both her bluffing skills and her hand-to-hand combat come in handy. In December, at the Beijing International Micro Film Festival, Poker Queen was named Best Web Film, and Liu took the prize for Best Actress in that category. According to Liu, after several successful fight scenes in that film she spent the next year or two being offered almost nothing but roles that required her to throw punches. In the comedy Tian Jin Hateful 5 a different skill served her well. Her Xiao Yan, a member of a team of con artists, could turn up to her next mark dressed as a wealthy lady and in the following scene pass for a waitress or a nurse.
That same year, in the two seasons of the series Personal Assistant of Female President, Liu played Zhao Wenwen, while the musician from the Chinese-Korean group UNIQ Zhou Yi-Xuan played the fighter Leng Feng. In March 2020 the actress wrote on Weibo that they had met on that shoot and later started dating. She described flying to Korea to see him before Chinese New Year, where he had previously spent the holidays away from his family. They walked around together and even left a love lock as a memento. According to Liu, almost no one knew about their relationship. She claimed that the agency had threatened his parents with leaving Zhou without work if the romance continued. In 2017, she said, Zhou suggested they break up and asked her to keep everything secret.
The trigger for her post was a spat between Zhou's fans and the actress Chen Meng-Yao, who announced that she was dating him. Liu wrote that after that episode it was especially hard for her to see Chen speak so openly about her romance with Zhou. Along with the text she posted a group photo from an event with two other people standing between her and Zhou. At the end of the message Liu asked the fans to keep supporting him. Later that same month Zhou publicly wished Chen a happy birthday, and she replied with a heart emoji. No reaction from Zhou or his agency to Liu's account was reported in the publications of that time.
In 2020, producers, fearing coronavirus outbreaks in film crews, asked in work chats that productions do without Beijing actors where possible. According to Liu, she was left without work for almost six months. In the summer she gradually returned to shooting, and by 2021, as she recalled, one already had to fight for a free soundstage in Hengdian. In the costume drama Puppet (2024), she played Su Qing, the abducted wife of a Ming dynasty detective, and in Space Mutation (2026), Su Qingya, one of the characters in a story about an infected research vessel. In the spring of that same year, Liu and Li Jing-Yi starred in the detective mini-series Lost Bones (失骨). It is set in Republican-era China, and the investigation begins when a master and his apprentice are invited to examine remains in the house of a wealthy family.
