Auditions for tentpole blockbusters can be grueling things, often taking months. For Yifei Liu, star of the upcoming Mulan, her audition was an even more grueling process than usual. For most Disney live-action remakes, the actors have to prove they can not just act, but also sing. For Liu, no singing was required – this will be a more grounded take than what we’ve seen to date – but she had an even tougher audition, needing to prove she had the athletic abilities and physical prowess to play the girl-turned-warrior who saved China. So competitive was the audition that Liu beat out 1,000 other actresses for the part, thanks largely to her edge with martial arts.
Director Niki Caro recently talked about the grueling process she put Yifei Liu through to land the role, speaking to Empire about it:
“I needed a warrior, and I needed a partner. So she did this grueling audition and then we sent her straight to the physical trainer to do an equally grueling physical assessment. Weights, push-ups, pull-ups, everything. She was brilliant in the dramatic part of the audition, and in the physical part she never stopped, never faulted. I knew at the end of that day that I’d found my warrior.”
In fact, Liu was so good in the role and took to the athleticism of it so well that she intimidated the men around her on set. “She set the bar so high on set,” Caro explained. “She was so much tougher than any of the boys surrounding her. They were terrified of her strength.”
Earlier this week, Disney released a special look featurette that gave us a sneak peek at the stunt choreography behind Mulan and it’s clear to see, from this and the trailers, that Liu isn’t afraid to mix it up and she’s not relying on a stunt double for every scene that involves even a little bit of fighting. She’s doing wire work, charging into the fray, throwing blocks and kicks, swinging her sword and, what’s more, she’s doing it all convincingly.
It’s not just swordplay that Yifei Liu had to get good at, either. Mulan isn’t a swordswoman but a fully-rounded warrior. As such, Liu had to learn how to sword fight, do convincing wirework, getting better at riding a horse, learn archery, and honing her previous martial arts skills. Learning all of that didn’t come easy, either: Yifei Liu explained her intense training process to The Wrap, saying, “I’ve had three months of training. It’s quite challenging — six or seven hours a day.”
The results have been impressive, so far, judging from the trailers. Cinematographer Mandy Walker confirmed that the battle sequences we see in Mulan are indeed all real rather than CGI, with about 60 horses and 100 people on either side of the fight. That’s what gives the battle scenes such a visceral, tangible feel. The background soldiers aren’t being fleshed out and populated with special effects; the horses and soldiers charging toward each other are all physical.
Also real and not CGI: Yifei Liu in those scenes. Walker revealed that Liu did about 90% of her own stunts. While they had a stuntperson on set, Liu was given the option to try the stunt first and nine out of ten times, she nailed it. That means the vast majority of action scenes you see in the movie will be Liu herself – no stuntperson in a bad wig or cut-away edits that hide their face or slightly wonky CGI to make it look more like the actor. It’s all Liu, right down one particularly eye-popping maneuver in the most recent trailer that shows her backflipping onto a galloping horse in the midst of battle:
However, it’s not just Liu’s raw athletic prowess that helped her out while shooting. The battles sequences of Mulan aren’t all brute force and testosterone. Instead, the trailers show that the action scenes are choreographed like dances. There’s a beauty and a grace in the fighting that straightforward action movies lack. Liu’s strong background in dance (she’s been a trained dancer since she was eight years old) helped her nail the choreographed beats of the fight sequences and lent her fighting an elegance that other actresses lack.
Luckily, Liu also had previous experience with martial arts, or wuxia films. Mulan, while not technically being a wuxia film, borrows heavily from the genre. A number of her roles, both on TV and in movies, rely heavily on martial arts (or “wugong”). Forty episodes of The Return of the Condor Heroes and the Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils series, as well as movie The Forbidden Kingdom and The Four film franchise. While filming Forbidden Kingdom, she got training in fighting from two legendary masters of martial arts – none other than Jackie Chan and Jet Li, who taught her tiny tips and tricks to make her action seem more lifelike and real on screen.
Add that all up, and you have an actress who drew on all her previous experience and added a crazy amount of new skills in order to become a real-life warrior on screen. The results of all that hard work will pay off when Mulan hits theaters on March 27th.
