Netflix’s Shadow and Bone star Jessie Mei Li on being half-Chinese, growing up in England and her love for Edgar Wright
- Li felt an immediate kinship with her character, a mixed-race girl blessed with remarkable powers, in Shadow and Bone as ‘it reflected my life in lots of ways’
- Li, whose father is Hong Kong-Chinese, has felt conflicted by her dual identity in the past: ‘I was very Chinese to my school friends but never feeling it’
When Jessie Mei Li was offered the role of Alina Starkov in the new Netflix fantasy series Shadow and Bone, she experienced more than just the usual elation that a young actress scoring her first major television lead might feel.
There was an immediate kinship with Starkov, the heroine of Leigh Bardugo’s Grishaverse series of Young Adult books, which is set in a divided and dangerous world where monsters and humans coexist. The 25-year-old Li could see herself in the journey of Starkov, a lowly cartographer’s assistant who has been blessed with remarkable powers.
Unlike the books, the character has been made mixed race (half-Shu, half-Ravkan). “It wasn’t just a diversity box ticker,” she argues. “It was something to help build the world and to help build her character.”
With the two nations at war with each other, the decision from Bardugo and showrunner Eric Heisserer (who wrote 2016 sci-fi hit Arrival) to make Starkov mixed-race “adds so much” to her journey through the eight-episode season, she says. “I thought it was a very freeing thing to experience – she’s half-Shu, but she’s also going to save the world. It felt very close to my heart.”
With an English mother and a father who is Hong Kong-Chinese, “it was a really interesting role for me to play because it kind of felt like it reflected my life in lots of ways”, says Li. “Not being really sure in myself and who I am and where my ethnicity plays a part. And then being shoved into this massive TV show. My life was mirroring Alina’s in lots of ways while we were filming.”