liu yihong, upon hearing a fan yell "陶泽!"

zhiwei (xiao haiyang) and liu yihong (tao ze) being stupid cute on the jitd set [x]

everyone's straight bestie tao ran

i know i yell a lot about the mains in jitd, for obvious reasons, but i feel i must take a moment to praise the work of 刘一宏 liu yihong, playing tao ze. i've never seen him in a single other thing but HE IS A PERFECT TAO RAN and has 100% become him, now, in my brain.

(why is he going through it here? not telling, you'll have to watch.)

an actor has to be a lot of contradictory things, to be tao ran, but mostly he has to be the literal straight man to his friends' weird banana men: serious, cheerful, calm, sane. liu yihong has figured out how to balance all this. he's openly affectionate to fei du yet keeps him at the appropriate distance; he and lwz work so well together and so visibly, obviously trained under the same shifu that it's a little uncanny; and he's also very good at depicting tao ran as completely bewildered by his two friends, who have always been at each other's throats and are now, suddenly, bizarrely, flirting. is the world ending? is he imagining things? does luo wenzhou have a concussion? he doesn't have too much time to think about it, though, bc crime.

(since when are these bickering mortal enemies making slutty EYES at each other?!? why does lwz keep SMILING LIKE THAT????)

i really hope liu yihong gets better work after this, bc he truly brought his A-game to a role someone else might have found pro forma, even boring, and just phoned it in. it's one of those parts that seems basic yet is genuinely challenging—tao ran has to run the gamut from "babbling incoherently when he talks to girls" to "staunchly devoted to his hotheaded gay best friend who's also his boss now" and, maybe the hardest of these, "fiercely competent cop," which means a metric FUCK TON of police dialogue (nearly as bad as scifi gabble, for most actors), but he makes it all look natural and easy.

also he's a good scene partner; he works so well with both mains, it's seamless. plus he gives one hell of a reaction shot—look at him here, realizing things! figuring shit out, in real time, with a camera looming approximately 18" from his face! that is NOT easy to do; good job, sir.

some of the most difficult, challenging material still lies ahead, obviously, but i'm completely confident he's got this. he clearly read the novel, like the others, bc he's sensitive to where its emotional beats should fall (and so is the director, but more on him later). so thank you, liu yihong, whose name i just learned today. things are about to be very-not-great in the world of tao ze, but fuck it you ball.

PS both @bladedweaponsandswishycoats and i were super sad he didn't get one of his most hilarious lines from the novel, the deadpan "by process of elimination, the mole can only be me." maybe he'll say it later? he also didn't get to nearly bite his tongue off when lwz blurts out, "he's my lover," and he would have done so well with that—

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