In October 2019, "Crossfire" was completed, and Liu Shuailiang returned home.
His friends usually call him "Sunshine Big Boy", and after seeing him, they were a little surprised, "What's wrong with you?" Dark circles are so severe. ”
At that time, Liu Shuailiang did not sleep well, insomnia every day, and after the three months of the shooting of "Crossfire", he was deeply trapped in the pain of Xu Wei's hit-and-run, killing, and betraying his friends, and his mood was irritable and gloomy. And the director Xu Hongyu is a film director, accustomed to letting actors act with a sense of truth, without the protective shell of skills, the actors reveal the most real self.
Therefore, they are tired and tired after every emotional scene they shoot. "We all really drank, really ate, really cried, and really felt that we had lost our brothers, and our hearts were particularly uncomfortable."
When Liu Shuailiang first entered the industry, the senior Yuan Qiongdan said a word to him, she said, "Shuailiang, acting is very tiring. "I said tired, she said tired."
It was 8 years ago, when Liu Shuailiang did not understand, until he met the role of Xu Wei, he understood what "tired" meant. It took him almost two months, sleeping, not seeing people, playing basketball every day, before adjusting his state.
Although I was tired, the shooting time of "Crossfire" in the past six months, coupled with the pre-script reading, action training, and staying up one by one in the heat and the big night, liu Shuailiang gained too many things. Whether it's about the shots or the performances, whether it's conceptual or emotional, there's too much.
"I don't know if you found a detail, this is what I found out when I saw episodes 8 and 9, the light that the director gave Lu Han was a warm light, his face was always warm, and the light on my side was a little bit cold." He is trying to embody the opposite, two different people, light fighting differently.
"You can pay attention when you look back." He instructed.
01
Time back to before "Crossfire" started, the crew called Liu Shuailiang's agent and sent the script of the first episode of "Crossfire" to let him try a play. Liu Shuailiang only watched one episode and felt that he wanted to act, "because many of the words he wrote were the words that his parents said when he was in school, and he appeared in his life, and his brotherly feelings were also very emotional." ”
He tried the scene for more than three hours and gave director Xu Hongyu five different role states. Although the director felt that Liu Shuailiang's personality was a bit like Qilin and he did like Qilin himself, xu Wei's extreme and distinct advantages and disadvantages of the role, he had not acted, he wanted to challenge such a real person.
Later, through the audition, the director finally decided to play Liu Shuailiang as Xu Wei. Audition on the day, clapboard on the same day.
When Xu Wei was taken down, the script for the last 16 episodes of "Crossfire" had not yet come out, and Liu Shuailiang was still sighing, "My God, this role is too good, I said absolute brother." As a result, as soon as the script came out after 16 episodes, he was stupid, "How can I be so bad?" ”
The conflict on Xu Wei's body is very extreme, running away after hitting people with a car, killing people in order to cover up the crime, and then borrowing game bugs to get rid of his brother Xiao Feng, piles and pieces, are not ordinary people can experience, can not take materials from life, can only rely on imagination to reflect. Liu Shuailiang checked many murderers' materials, autobiographies, and interviews, including videos related to drunk driving and hit-and-run, to find the status of the characters.
In the two months after the crew filmed Xu Wei's collision with people and killed people, Liu Shuailiang became irritable and irritable, exploded at a small matter, and his spirit was also very confused, completely into the play. "Sometimes when an actor acts, you feel that this person is alive and real, and you have to fully integrate into the role, and every day you have a sense of guilt for taking two lives, which is particularly uncomfortable." 」
A particularly uncomfortable one is that Xu Wei threw Xiao Feng into the game bug, but in Liu Shuailiang's view, Xu Wei still cared about this brother at that time, and it was xu Wei who turned himself in because Xu Wei harmed Xiao Feng, because Xu Wei was a person who fought hard to win, he was afraid of losing, he was going to win, so it caused this series of tragedies.
They had always said that there were things they had said before, including chasing their girlfriends, and they were also open to fair competition, and he actually never hated Xiao Feng. Including being caught by Xiao Feng at the end, he said, 'It's all because you made me turn myself in, you see I live in a big villa, driving more than 5 million sports cars'. His hatred was that Xiao Feng persuaded him to turn himself in, nothing else. ”
Xu Wei would not allow anyone to stand in his way, and Liu Shuailiang even felt that even if the people who blocked him were his parents, he would not allow it. This is Xu Wei, for the sake of so-called success, not afraid of all wrong concepts and practices.
At the end of the story, Xu Wei has a car accident and ends his life in the exact same way he did when he caused the accident 11 years ago, as if the fate was reincarnated. At the end of his life, he looked at the sky with great excitement, and the beauty of the past flashed in front of his eyes, "The first time and 1coin disbanded, separated from Xiao Feng, the monkey married, 1coin reorganized, the team got sponsorship for the first time, won the championship for the first time..."
Liu Shuailiang felt that Xu Wei did not regret it at that time, because he successfully established a gravitational e-sports dynasty, lived a "superior" life, lived in a villa, drove a luxury car, and realized his so-called dream.
"But in fact, he has more things in his mind than those fragments of memories, there are beautiful ones, there are sad ones, and the audience will hate and feel very sad about this role after watching it."
02
Can cultivate a character that will not resort to any means to achieve the goal, Xu Wei must have had a very complex growth environment. Liu Shuailiang talked with the director, "Maybe Xu Wei's family sells underwear and socks, from a small stall, and finally to a small store, but the money is also very small." He grew up observing his parents, being ridiculed or treated coldly by people who bought things, and he must have experienced all this. Maybe these things irritated him, causing him to become a superior person. ”
Although Liu Shuailiang's own growth experience is not as complicated as Xu Wei, he also had a dream when he was a child, that is, to become a professional basketball player. When I grew up, because I was sick from an early age, my physical fitness could not keep up, and then I dreamed of playing a college professional league, "cuba or something," to complete a basketball dream.
Unfortunately, in his third year of high school, he was injured and could no longer play basketball, and the coach suggested that he go to art school, and he took the test.
At that time, Liu Shuailiang did not have much ambition, he did not even know how famous Chinese opera and Nortel were, only that they were art schools. He went to the exam with the mentality of "seeing if he could meet a bit of a star photo", enrolled in five schools, and finally entered the Central Academy of Drama with a score of 15th in the country.
Before the exam, Liu Shuailiang enrolled in an acting class in Shenyang and spent 800 yuan to study for more than 20 hours, wanting to understand how performance was going on.
"When I took the test, there were 15 people in a classroom, and the teacher's question was that after graduation, you would run to each other and prepare in 3 minutes. I wonder if I have to cry after graduation? I didn't learn to act, I was just about to fake crying, and one of the ones who had learned to act squatted on the ground, wow, wow, tears flowed out, I said wow, act well. ”
He was stunned on the field for nearly 30 seconds, thinking, he stole my scene, what should I do? Supposedly, my classmate was crying, did I have to comfort him? "I said it's all right, buddy, you see my graduation assignment is very good, I will introduce you to my leader later, let's do it together." At this time, seven or eight people also went to comfort this classmate, and the remaining group of people performed their own ones, and later we comforted the classmates of this group of people, and the group of people who did not pass. ”
Although he successfully entered the Chinese opera, Liu Shuailiang himself believes that there is some luck. Just went to college, when he practiced tongue twisters and practiced sound in the morning, he played basketball, and his mind was not on the performance, he only felt that his basketball dream was broken, and he did not want to take the exam in this school. Later, he learned that Chinese opera is the best art school, and it is the Tsinghua Peking University in the art world.
He also painted when he was a child, and in his junior year, once his teacher taught them to draw Chinese painting, which aroused his interest. Then he acted in the school's stage play, "The First Floor of the World" in the Fifth Master of Ke, and also took a third-class acting scholarship and awarded 2,000 yuan.
"I found that I still had to be interested before I did it, and then I slowly became more interested in acting. Acting is a researcher, and after reading novels and scripts, I have a lot of new understandings of life, and I understand things that I didn't understand before. Then the performance also made me more emotional, and I felt everything around me, the flowers and grasses, including a grain of dust, and it was very good. ”
03
Since graduation, although there have been ups and downs in the middle, relatively speaking, Liu Shuailiang feels that he is still quite smooth. He doesn't shy away from acting badly, but there are still a few better works supporting him.
And he believes that no matter how good the drama is, no matter how bad the drama, some things will be harvested. Different people, different teams, different shooting methods, he always learned something from it. "There is a saying called 'live to learn to be old', and acting is also, acting for a lifetime, acting to be more than 80 years old may encounter some new things."
Liu Shuailiang frankly said that there are no actors who do not want to play a good play, but there are not so many good scripts under the sky, and sometimes to perform some bad plays, but also to survive. "You really don't have any money to make money if you don't act, unless you let the family give you money." I don't let my parents give me money anymore, I let my parents give me money again, I don't want to go in my heart, so big, I still let my parents raise it. ”
He often chatted with some old artists, and gradually accepted this truth: before pursuing higher, basic food and clothing are still very important.
It is true that art and reality sometimes cannot coexist, and of course there are people who do not care about survival for the sake of art, but there are very few such people. "If one day you are really desperate, come to a bad play, maybe this bad play will ruin your reputation, but the money given to you can guarantee that you will not have to act in a bad play for 10 years, there is enough living space to pick a play, can you act?" Do you have to starve to death if you don't act? This is a very real problem. ”
"Insisting on yourself" and "living" are questions that Liu Shuailiang often thinks about during the epidemic. He sometimes wonders, am I acting in a bad play right for the audience? First of all, he is sorry not to say that he is not worthy of the audience, even he himself is sorry, but what can be done?
Especially the current actors are more stressful than Liu Shuailiang's at that time. He remembers the house he rented when he first graduated, 107 square meters, more than three thousand yuan a month, and now the same size house, the monthly rent is nearly ten thousand yuan smaller. "You said that the children who graduated in 2020 will have so much money to start with, and this is only the rent."
How to stick to the dream under the premise of ensuring survival has always been a difficult problem for the public to solve.
When he just graduated, Liu Shuailiang had no ambition, and was influenced by old artists since he was a child, and doing a good job was the most important thing, and his mother also told him that when he became an actor, he should calm his mind. Sometimes he can't make money, and his mother sees more openly than he does.
"So under their influence, I didn't think about the problem of fire until 2016, when the actor has to rush to the front line, whether he has to take the first, there is no." It wasn't until later that I discovered that if you want to work with a good team, sometimes fame and popularity are part of the consideration. ”
Actor Wang Jingchun took the Berlin and Tokyo double film emperor, but also gave Liu Shuailiang stimulation, he thought, if one day he can take this kind of film emperor, it is really a pride that money can not buy, he also wants to be like these excellent predecessors. It's like he's going to win a championship when he plays basketball, it's the same thing.
Liu Shuailiang's ideal life is to shoot half a year of drama, rest for half a year, like Hollywood actors usually go to work, start at 6 o'clock in the morning, and end at 6 o'clock in the evening, but he knows that this is impossible. In his eyes, most of the actors are very simple, because they spend a lot of time isolated from society.
"Like "Crossfire" filmed for half a year, this half a year when we have been in the crew, every day is the shooting scene, the hotel and other places, the mall almost did not go much, all the news that happened outside, social concerns, are also filmed or every few days to know. He also did not have contact with friends and family, sometimes he was tired at work, he rarely video chatted with his family, and most of the time he lived in the role. If you shoot three scenes a year, ninety months have passed, and you are still in contact with the circle of actors, which is actually a bit isolated from society. ”
This situation is also a major difficulty for actors to portray their roles. As an actor, you should contact people from all walks of life, waiters, company white-collar workers, bosses, all kinds of people, and feel life. But if there is no time to contact, it can only be the character who comes, and with the time and necessity to experience life, he can experience it.
"You said you let me play an executive at a company now, I don't have that life experience, acting can only rely on imagination." So most of the actors I've seen so far are still very simple. ”
Liu Shuailiang, a simple actor, also wants to try to act in an idol drama. After filming "Donkey Got Water", most of the people who found him were rural dramas, and he joked that he wanted to take advantage of his youth to make an idol drama and leave his youngest and handsome side in the images full of youth. Then there are those who want to play real, well-founded characters, such as historical figures, soldiers, policemen or scientists.
"What do you imagine you might be like in an idol drama?"
Liu Shuailiang laughed and said, "It is the kind on campus, playing a basketball, riding a motorcycle to talk to the heroine about a vigorous love, and doing an earth-shattering thing." He longed, "Maybe when I was a child, I was particularly naughty and naughty, but when I grew up, everyone found that he was the most outstanding one." ”
True as he is, he answers every question seriously and with integrity. For acting, he has gone from love to persistence, and now he is constantly learning and improving, gradually allowing each role to be recognized by everyone.
I believe that actor Liu Shuailiang will eventually have the day of "winning the championship".