Pan Chun-Chun 潘春春
The name Pan Chun-Chun began appearing in the Chinese entertainment press in 2013. She posed for magazines, appeared on TV shows, recorded songs and acted in short films released online. Later, when Chinese video platforms moved into feature films, Pan found steady work. In Eight Warriors she wields two massive hammers, in The Dragon Nine she plays a scheming court villainess, and in Ace Bodyguard she comes to her partner's rescue after an attack leaves the money he was tasked with transporting missing.
According to published biographies, Pan Chun-Chun was born on 10 January 1990 in Yan'an, Shaanxi Province. Little is known about her family. In a programme broadcast on iQIYI in 2015, Pan was presented as a girl who had herded sheep as a child. A biography published by the Chongqing organising committee of a tourism ambassador contest says that Pan wanted to become a television presenter and, while still a student, tried her hand at hosting programmes in her university's radio and television studio. Exactly where she studied is hard to judge from the available publications. In 2012 the Tianshan portal named the Xi'an Institute of Radio, Film and Television, while a year later Sina wrote about the Chinese language department of Beijing Normal University. By that time Pan was already working as a photographic model and appearing in advertisements for lingerie and online games.
Chinese press accounts call her first film role that of a girl nicknamed Doubao in Zou Peng's drama Sauna on the Moon (嫦娥). Pan said that in the film the name of the moon goddess belongs to a seaside club in the Pearl River Delta. The film's heroines work at this club, whose owner dreams of turning the modest establishment into an entire entertainment empire. The world premiere took place in May 2011 in Cannes, in the Critics' Week competition. By May 2014 the picture had still not passed Chinese censorship. That month it was shown for the first time in the United Kingdom, at University College London, with special permission from the director and the distributors. Pan's name is not among the four performers listed in the Cannes programme. Her role was written about by Tianshan and by the Hong Kong newspaper Oriental Daily, which noted that Doubao appears on screen only briefly.
In March 2013 Pan appeared on the dating show "Date a Star" (约会万人迷) on the Dongnan television channel. On air she introduced herself as a nutrition specialist in traditional Chinese medicine, and in the finale she left the stage arm in arm with Sun Hui. He was already known for a video from Beijing in which he sang under a pedestrian bridge and looked for a bride while posing as a poor man, then drove off in a BMW. After the broadcast, viewers found information about Pan's filming work and her advertising jobs and suspected that the couple had staged the meeting for self-promotion. On 18 March the China News Service agency reprinted a piece from the newspaper Chengshi Wanbao with a response from the show's editorial team. According to the producers, both participants had been spoken to before filming and were confirmed to have come looking for a partner. After the show, the editorial team maintained, Pan and Sun continued to date. Pan herself explained, through the editorial team and on Weibo, that she had taken nutrition courses and had already practised under a specialist's guidance, and that she had kept quiet about her filming work because she was afraid of scaring off someone she might like.
In April the programme of a genre short film showcase in Tongli included Richard's Perfect Lover (2012 according to the Sohu Video catalogue; other publications give 2013). Pan played a secretary in a comedy about an office worker who tries to arrange an ideal love life for himself with the help of a phone app. The director Seven Su Liang emphasised the comic nature of the role through the heroine's costume and exaggerated manners. In the summer Pan posted a series of pictures on Weibo in which she posed nude, covered only in rhinestones. The photographs circulated through entertainment publications. Even a news item about the recording of her first song was illustrated by Sina with shots from a different revealing photo shoot.
In October Pan was filming in Guangzhou in Nen Mo Quan (2013), where she received one of the three lead roles. Her character is also called Chun-Chun. The film was conceived as a story about girls trying to make a living in the entertainment industry. It was the first project of the short film commission at the Guangdong Popular Music Association. At the time the commission also announced that it intended to make one hundred such films. That same autumn Pan released the song "You Don't Love Me Enough" on Feile Music. In 2014 she was invited to represent a modelling contest in Shaanxi, and in 2015 she appeared again on a dating show, this time on iQIYI. There she had to choose one of three suitors based on hints from live-stream viewers. She herself neither saw nor heard the suitors.
In those years, Chinese game developers were already commissioning films to promote their new releases. In The Light of Darkness (2014), made to support the game of the same name, Pan is the first of six models to appear on screen. Her character is seen in a nightclub, dressed in an ancient Roman costume. By the middle of the decade, Pan was appearing more often in thrillers. In The Ripping Game Killer (2016) she played Pan Mimi, one of the game's participants who end up locked in, while in Scary Notes (2016), an anthology of stories based on urban legends, she was cast as Bai Jie, a feisty regular at an internet cafe.
In December 2017, Sohu Video released Eight Warriors, a fantasy about fighters from different eras gathered for a duel by a modern-day sorcerer. Pan was given the male role of Tang Yuanba, modeled on the mighty warrior Li Yuanba from the legends about the founding of the Tang dynasty. In the set photos she wears an eyepatch and wields prop hammers almost half her height. In January 2018, the Taiwanese outlet ETtoday reported that viewers had criticized the 55-second trailer for its abundance of close-ups of cleavage.
In 2019, Henan Television aired Team Dragon Descendant, a series about the origins of Chinese surnames. Pan played the concubine Da Ji in the story of the ancestor of the Xiong clan, set at the close of the Shang dynasty. The actress told the newspaper Zhengzhou Wanbao that of the previous performers in this role, Irene Wan Pik-Ha was the closest to her. Of her own scenes, Pan particularly singled out the one in which Da Ji performs a classical dance before the ruler.
In Mutant Python (2021), a horror film about a village where a girl is to be sacrificed to a giant snake, Pan played Zhang Chunhua, the local tofu seller. In The Dragon Nine (2022) she was cast as the scheming court villainess Zhen Fei. The director, who also played the lead role himself, included a bathing scene for Zhen Fei in the film. An HKCinema reviewer considered the scene a gift to Pan's fans and remarked that the actress could be appearing more often.
In March 2023, Ace Bodyguard was released on Tencent Video and iQIYI. Pan's character, Tan Jialuo, steps in to help a colleague tasked with escorting the boss's daughter and transporting a large sum of money. After an attack, the girl is kidnapped and the money disappears. The following year, iQIYI released Divine Detective Xiu'er: The Mysterious Power of Luo Tong. Pan plays a missing girl whom the detective finds while investigating a locked-room murder. Luo Tong helps him solve several complex cases.
In June 2025, two films starring Pan were released in Chinese cinemas a week apart. In the black comedy Unusual Deal, which had gone into production back in 2016, she played Ke Meimei, a rich man's girlfriend. Early reports on the shoot said the characters travel to Macau, while descriptions of the released film also mention Malaysia. In Horrible Mountain Villa she was cast as Ding Mei. The picture was promoted as an adaptation of a story about a Thai house where an entire family supposedly died.
