POPPY LIU ON I LOVE BOOSTERS, JIANHU, AND THE RADICAL BEAUTY OF COMMUNITY

INTERVIEW BY IRVIN RIVERA

POPPY LIU knows how to move between worlds. In Boots Riley’s I LOVE BOOSTERS, a wildly stylish, anti-capitalist crime comedy starring Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie, Taylour Paige, Poppy Liu, Eiza González, LaKeith Stanfield, Will Poulter, Don Cheadle, and Demi Moore, Liu plays Jianhu, a Chinese factory worker whose clarity, conviction, and quiet fury cut straight through the film’s maximalist chaos. Her character’s name carries an echo of Jianghu (江湖), which literally means “rivers and lakes” in Chinese but culturally evokes a mythic martial-arts underworld, a parallel society operating outside imperial control and mainstream law. It is a fitting spirit for a film in which fashion, labor, theft, humor, and resistance collide.

For Liu, Jianhu is not a symbol first. She is a person on a mission. In conversation, Liu traces the role back to migration, community, labor, reproductive justice, and the strange art of knowing when the world is asking you to perform and when it is time to come home to yourself. She speaks of her “constant, dormant longing and yearning for China,” of the grassroots rooms that shaped her before Hollywood, and of a film ending that still makes her cry because it reminds her of “our potential, and what we can do.” Then, just when the conversation starts to feel like a manifesto, she grounds it with chickens, vegetable gardens, fan fiction, and a reminder that the real currency is not capital, but care. “When we are together,” Liu says, “we are powerful and can be so beautiful.”

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Poppy, in I Love Boosters, your character Jianhu moves through a world shaped by labor, survival, language, and power that feels especially layered. Knowing you were born in Xi'an and raised between Minnesota and Shanghai, how did moving between those places teach you to read rooms, adjust to different worlds, and understand a character like Jianhu from the inside out?

I love this question so much. It's so thoughtful, and I feel only another migrant person could summon it. I mean, I feel it's shaped every aspect of who I am. Not just the duality of being between these worlds and stuff, but I think I feel really connected to my Chinese heritage, even though I'm very Americanized. I grew up in Minnesota. I went back to China as a teenager for high school, but I was at an American school, so it was not the same kind of experience. But I feel in my heart there's still such a strong kind of love and connection, an ancestral connection with China. And in the back of my mind, I'm like, oh, one day it would be amazing to go back there and work there and make films there. But I haven't lived there in so long. I don't even really know what the cultural landscape is. I know America so well, you know? This is the place I've been the longest.

But anyways, all that to say I kind of just have this constant, dormant longing and yearning for China and the motherland. So I feel for Jianghu's character in particular, that she's not only a Chinese girl. She's not even a Chinese-American girl; she's just fully Chinese, and I actually think that in my film career, maybe this is the first time that I've played just a fully Chinese character. And obviously, she can speak English; many young kids in China can, too. Her objective is so clear, and she's fighting for her people in China; it felt really emotional for me. It just felt really emotional and special, and, to what you were asking, how trying to adapt to all these different places has shaped how I approach this character. I think it definitely shaped my approach to a lot of my work in the industry. I'm able to move through many different spaces. And I think my parents, too. It's not even just code-switching. It's adapting to a new environment. It's being nimble and a lot of the soft power skills that you inevitably have to cultivate, and I think that's just really intrinsic to me. Because I feel that in this job, the performance isn't just what's on screen. The performance is also in the industry. This entire press tour was a gigantic performance. Every premiere is a performance. Even this (this interview), in a way, is authentic and genuine, but it's a performance, too. I can step in and out of it very easily, which has helped me a lot. I think not just in knowing how to navigate the industry or approach my different roles through this lens, but also in being able to come back to myself at the end of the day. I just did a crazy press tour, and it's insane, and it's all glitz, and it's glamour, and it's the outfits, but then I really can shake it off very fast. And now I'm back home, and right before I got on the call, I wanted to check on my chickens.

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I love that.

And after this, I'm going to go back and harvest from my vegetable garden and do other stuff. So, anyway, I think that it feels like a superpower to be able to step between these roles and in between these worlds and know when you're performing and know when you're not, because I think a lot of people don't realize when they are performing.

And the worst is when you're doing it unconsciously. I feel that because I'm so hyper-aware of it, I feel that I have a lot of agency over how and who I'm showing up as in a given moment.

I love that you mentioned that. It's such a superpower because, again, as you said, not a lot of people possess that skill set. It's a skill, and you have to be so grounded to have self-awareness of not just the duality, but the multiple worlds that you're living in.

It is. Yes.

I feel like you’ve been doing that throughout your career. Anyway, speaking of your career, you built your work through community, through grassroots, art, and personal storytelling. How did the early chapters of your career change the kind of rooms you trust now, especially when a project asks you to bring politics, humor, and vulnerability into the same frame?

Okay, I think it is the greatest, greatest, greatest gift, Mashallah, Alhamdulillah, that I spent most of my adult life through most of my 20s, being an artist outside of the industry. For most of my 20s, I lived in New York, and I was only making stuff with friends and in the community. We were all kind of at the intersections of art and activism. We were all involved in movement building. I can't even say "indie" because "indie" in Hollywood means something different. “I Love Boosters” is technically an indie, but that word doesn't really apply here. It was truly grassroots. We would reach 50 people per, but it feels like the revolution. It was that whole thing. So, anyway. I feel I spent a lot of time discovering who my community is, really understanding and getting to know myself. And I don't know if everyone goes through this. I imagine that most artists do at least.

I felt I had to try on several versions of myself to know who I actually was. And I think especially as diasporic people, as a migrant person, as a queer person, each of those pieces came in at a different time. I didn't get the full picture of who I was until maybe my mid-to-late twenties, when I was like, "Oh, my God!" Everything's integrating, and everything's clicking in, and that feels amazing. My sense of self felt really strong, and only then did I start working in the industry. And I'm really, really grateful for that, because I feel I already got to develop a really solid foundation of self, of community, and of my values and the things I care about before entering this very high-intensity environment where I can really see how again, the glamour and the intensity and the desire to be a part of it, the attraction of the industry has its own gravitational pull. And it's not that I'm fully immune to it; I just feel that my own gravitational pull in my life is much stronger. Um, yeah, the community piece is everything. I feel like I need that always to be grounded. And honestly, I think most of my best, best, best, and closest friends don't necessarily work in the industry. They're not actors, they're all creatives, but they're illustrators, or authors, or writers, or kind of organizers or visual artists and painters and stuff, and so I feel much more through my community, tied to my identity as an artist, and as someone who cares about social justice and the world than I do as an actor in Hollywood, for instance.

I feel like that's another gift in itself.

Definitely. Huge gift.

And I love when you said that, there's a certain part of your life where you reach the stage where everything is integrating into this one full self. When you reach that state, it's bliss. It's amazing. I could say the same thing. Again, there are layers to being an immigrant, a member of the LGBTQ+ community, plus all these other layers that you have and these different identities that you bring in. And then, for some reason, you become this kind of fully realized person. I mean, it's still evolving, but a more grounded, evolved form of self that's more solid.

Yeah. Totally.

Whatever happens around me, whatever chaos, I think I'm fine, because I know where I stand. I think that's beautiful in itself.

Definitely. Especially when it's trying to figure that stuff out while under public scrutiny, I imagine it's incredibly hard. I really feel for people who have been in the industry since they were very young, having the challenge of having to create their sense of self in this very, very, very high-intensity environment that kind of demands so much of you, and that everyone feels they kind of get a piece of you and stuff, and to be a young person going through that must be very confusing.

Yeah, because it also shapes you. It's a major factor shaping your personal growth.

Now back to Boosters. Boots Riley drops Jianhu into the wild, funny, anti-corporate world where fashion, labor, theft, and resistance all collide. How did you find the human truth of Jianhu inside a film that is so heightened and politically alive?

I think that Jianghu is actually a very admirable character. She's one of my favorite characters I've ever had the opportunity to play. When Boots and I first talked about the character, he told me that the inspiration for her name comes from a revolutionary woman during the Qing Dynasty who went by a name that I think means something like 'The knighted woman of Mirror Lake.” I have to double-check. But she was a feminist, and she was a revolutionary, and then ultimately was executed for a failed uprising against the Qing dynasty, which was very oppressive. She's hailed as a feminist, heroine, and martyr.

When Boots told me, this is who Jianghu's name is based on. I was like, dang, that's so sick! But as the character Jianhu, I don't think she knows or sees herself that way at all. She's just living her little life. But I think once she becomes radicalized, she shares her backstory, and you learn of it, but the minute we see her on screen, she's already on a mission.

And as a character, she was actually very uncomplicated, because her objective is crystal clear, and she never wavers from it. She never even gets existential about it. She knows exactly what she is here to do, and she's going to do it by any means necessary. And she's interesting because of how unwavering that is and how tunnel-visioned she is about it.

But I think, as an actor playing her, that actually simplified her character so much. I think the hardest part when you're playing a character is to understand the inner world of what is driving you and what is moving you. And with Jianhu, it was so clear. She’s just like an arrow. And so it was really fun to play someone who has that strong conviction. She's so badass, I love her.

I love that you're telling me this because it relates to you and the groundedness of it all.

Now, Boot's work can make absurdity feel like the most honest way to talk about capitalism.

Yes.

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How did his tone push you to calibrate your performance so the comedy never softened the stakes, and the politics never flattened the character?

Well, I think that all of that stuff, the social commentary piece, all the heavy lifting of those, Boots did in the writing. That's already in the script. Before we even stepped foot on set, and even just reading the script, I was like, " Oh, this is all here already.” So I actually feel it makes our job comparatively a lot easier, just having to play the earnestness of our characters, as written on the page.

There are layers of class, worker exploitation, global class solidarity, and the evils of capitalism- all of that in Jianhu's story. Also, she's not necessarily thinking about that or conscious of it. She's just, I want this for my people and stuff. So I think that part was cool, because, me as Poppy, I care about those themes so much, and I feel I could really nerd out about it for so long, And, I feel, again, when Boots and I first met, those are the stuff that we would talk about a lot, but then, once I'm actually working on the film itself, it's a totally different story. Now I'm just playing the character, and I don't think the character's thinking about it; she's thinking about other stuff.

And then, the humor, too, and the absurdity- I feel that's the part of it that felt like the artistry and the fun, to be in this Dr. Seuss-like world that's absurd. I think that's part of Boots' genius, too, is that it is very disarming, and to come into this movie being, oh, I'm here for maximalism, and it's fashion, and it's satire, and it's fun, it's quirky, and it's crazy, and it's silly. So you just kind of have your guard down, ready to be entertained, and then you get all of these layers of social commentary to it.

And I feel he strikes a really good balance between the two. Because I do find that people really shut down when they think they're being preached to or presented with something political. They like really shut off kind of emotionally, but I feel he doesn't really give you the chance to do that because you're so bombarded with just so much stuff, and it is so entertaining. You might be here for the entertainment, but the hope is that you will leave radicalized.

I feel like humor is definitely one of the tools you all used to convey the layers of meaning in this film. And it's really great.

Yeah! And I love that because it's this whole thing where revolutionary work should be joyful. And ultimately, it can be beautiful. And it is, it's inherently creative at its core.

It's almost sort of like, how do we make our movements more attractive? And if you take the intellectual stuff out of it, it's just about us caring about each other enough to want to make our lives better. The theme of it, even outside of the social commentary and political part of it, is honestly about the community- the support of your own community, helping you to be able to achieve your goals, and that you really need each other. I think that is such an optimistic message, and I feel the optimism is, hopefully, what keeps people open to maybe challenging how they see the world and questioning what could be different about it.

1000%. Speaking of community, at SXSW, you cried watching the film's vision of global workers unionizing and rising up.

Yeah…

How did that scene hit you, not only as an actor in the movie, but as someone whose work has long carried questions of migration, class, the body, and liberation?

It hit me. I still cry every time I see the film. I've seen the film five times, and then tonight's gonna be my sixth time, because it's opening night, and my friends did a theater buyout so we're all gonna go dressed in wigs and maximalism and color, and it's gonna be so cute and stuff, so that's gonna be my sixth time watching it.

Amazing.

But I do feel every single time, I get something new out of it. Or, something else lands, or a deeper thing sets in, but I still always, always get emotional at the end.

My friend Sky, who did my hair for all my New York press, she's so amazing, she messaged me last night because she saw an early preview screening, screaming, being like “oh my god, I bawled at the end,” And I was like, I know exactly what you're talking about. I know exactly the moment. I just felt so much pride. I'm so proud of Boots and the movie, but I also felt pride in us, our potential, and what we can do. I think I cried out of a deep love and admiration for humanity. Humans are… we really can do the thing. When we are together, we are powerful and can be so beautiful. And I think it's emotional when there's so much bad stuff going on. There are so many people who act out of selfishness and greed, and are destroying the planet and committing genocide, and there are times when I'm like, “Maybe humanity is an ugly thing?” “Maybe this is a failed experiment, humanity.” But then, this feeling I have at the end of Boosters is just being like, “no, there is hope, and there is goodness,” and yeah, I think that's what makes me emotional.

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That's so nice to hear, because that's what art does. That's what creating with your community does. And I hope that a lot of people get to feel that.

Yeah! I'm gonna cry again now.

Because, as someone in the creative field, I get that feeling as well when you create with people with the same vibration and all that, people with the same frequency. And it's such a good feeling, and I really just wish that other people could feel hopeful. Because, like what you said, that gives people hope.

Definitely, yeah. And also, I feel that the antidote is connection and the community piece. Because one of the greatest poisons of capitalism is that it isolates us from each other and pits us against each other. And it's this false narrative of every man for himself, where it's the individualistic- you got to do what's right for you and fuck everybody else.

We're not meant to live in isolation, and no one does. We're all interconnected to each other. But this myth of you have to isolate yourself, and it's just you literally, it cuts you off from the human spirit. And at the most basic level, the real currency is our relationships to one another and the way we care for each other. And, honestly, it's mutual aid.

It is. Yeah, if you go to the most basic level of us as humans, it's really not that complicated. Somebody just wants a hug. Somebody just needs love. If you go to the core of it, humans just want that basic human thing-connection.

If someone in my community is not able to get the things they need, like make rent this month, or eat food, or whatever, and they’re within our community, we can remedy that. And we can change that. They got a hit with taxes, and they couldn't pay it. But I'm doing well this year. Now that means they can pay their taxes. I also think of it as very tangible, too. Say, if we think of ourselves as the mutual aid piece. Nothing in the system of capitalism incentivizes you to do mutual aid. But it actually is the building blocks of interdependence. And it's not all capital-based. There are so many ways that my friends and community have shown up for me. Like when I had my kid, even now, with childcare, with helping me through difficult times, it's really reciprocal, and I think when we think about value exchange beyond just capital, we actually have so many resources we can share with each other, and that, we kind of actually have everything that we need among us.

Yes. Let me just interject this real quick, because I saw a TikTok yesterday about this lady encouraging people to just do barter. She has this app, and she's forming a barter community where people exchange goods, services, and skills. You have skills to offer beyond just the physical things. Those people have been trading in her community.

Hello? A great example. I love that.

Poppy, back to your career. Across I Love Boosters, Hacks, Dead Ringers, No Good Deed, The Afterparty, and His & Hers, you often play characters who wield power in rooms where others underestimate them. How do you decide what a character knows, what they hide, and what they are brave enough to reveal?

Oh, that's such a good question. I literally love your question so much. What they hide and what they reveal…

Well, I really like what you said about people underestimating them. I don't know if I'd even ever thought about it in those terms. Because I think maybe, kind of like what we were saying earlier about the superpower of being able to perform in different spaces and adapt to different environments and stuff. I actually think maybe I have a built-in superpower to just assume that you're gonna be underestimated and operate from that base level. I actually think maybe it's so intrinsic to how I grew up and how I watched my parents navigate being early immigrants.

We moved here when I was 2, so a lot of my childhood was kind of watching my parents in the early years of making it here and starting over. When they were in China, they were both on top of their game. It's 5% acceptance rate into universities from the college test, and they both got into one of the top 10 universities, and then, because they were the top students of their class, got put in as engineers. They were both performing at such a high level of academic excellence that they were the first in their families to go to college and the first to leave the country. And then they come here, and suddenly it's the exact opposite.

My mom has a story once about how, when she was working at a fast food restaurant, when we first moved here and stuff, someone asked what her plans were, and she was like, " Oh, I want to get my Master's,” and then they laughed at her. She could barely speak English. But I think just having to stomach the fact that people think you don't know anything and underestimate you. Having to overcome it emotionally while also doing the work to bypass a system that doesn't let you. My dad had to get a second PhD. Because his PhD in China wasn't recognized here. I don't know anyone else with 2 Phd other than my dad.

You have to do extra and more to prove yourself. But I think there's also the other side of it, where it is a superpower where, at least for me, and maybe because I'm a Capricorn, I really like the feeling of proving people wrong. People who underestimate you or don't think you can are really a special kind of fuel that I really, really like.

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I think it's a really powerful motivating force for me, and maybe I've subconsciously brought that to each of my characters. Or here's the thing, I think with a lot of the characters I play, not all of them are specifically Chinese American or Asian American, and stuff, which is really cool that we're in a place in our industry, because this wasn't even the case 10 years ago, that there were so many roles that, an Asian actor would be able to get to play, and I feel lucky I've gotten to play such an array of characters and.

I'm not a blank slate. I am who I am, and in order to do the due diligence of understanding the character and how they got there. I do have to create a backstory for how I am there, and I am still Chinese, so that still, at some point, has to be part of their story, whether the character puts a lot of weight on it or not. I always have to integrate that somehow, because the character has to have a history, and that history is just gonna come with some of the stuff I bring. Yeah, so I think that part is built in.

I like that mindset of shifting the hate into a challenge.

Poppy, your work as a doula and your reproductive justice advocacy give you a rare relationship to bodies, care, labor, and choice. How has that lived work changed the way you listen as an actor, especially in roles where someone’s exterior confidence is covering a private wound?

Oh, that's so beautiful. Wow. I mean. I feel it really comes from the same place. I remember, I think someone had asked me about the activism piece, and being an actor, and how they relate, and what part of you has an activist's heart or something? And I was like, oh, I think it's the same part of me that has an artist's heart. And I feel very strongly in that way, especially when it comes to reproductive justice and being a doula, because that's such a care-based work. It requires so much empathy, especially the doula training that I got. It was with an organization called Ancient Song, which is based in Bedstuy. It’s Black women-run; they have a birth justice lens through how they train their doulas. They provide mostly free and sliding-scale doula services, and many of the communities they serve are underserved, living at the margins, etc. So I feel a lot of what the training was actually about was you coming in and meeting someone where they're at, and not having preconceptions about what might be best for them. The job is to let them know that these are all your options. And, a lot of times, we don't know that, because I feel our medical system is so shrouded in mystery, purposefully so, so that we're very passive to it. So it's actually letting someone know they have agency, showing them many different paths or options, and helping them make deliberate choices along the way. And so I feel it's similar in acting to approach every character without any preconceptions about what I think they should be doing, no matter what I think they're doing. It's already written on the page. I don't always have a say in that. It exercises the same kind of empathy for someone else. I might not move the same way, but I really want to understand what's driving you. What are the obstacles that you're facing? What are the concerns in your inner world? And what are the things that make you feel supported and good and stuff, so they feel really, they feel very similar.

That's beautiful. Just like understanding other people, again, leads to better community building, which is such a beautiful thing.

Yeah! It all feels the same thing to me, honestly. I feel so lucky that I get to be an actor so much. The industry obviously feels really different, but the skill itself of acting and performing a role really doesn't feel very different from being a doula. That feels much closer, actually.

Poppy, if you were a book, what book would you be, and why? So this is an open question. It could be a book that hasn't been written yet, or a made-up one.

Okay, I know exactly the answer to this.

I would be an ongoing fanfiction series published on Archive of Our Own (AO3). That is an all-self-published, Tumblr-esque community and network of cuties online who write their fanfic. I just discovered fanfic recently, and I'm so fascinated by it, and I love it so much. And honestly, there's incredible work there. But this space is inherently so anti-capitalist, too. They have very strict ethics and rules. No one can monetize off any of it. But people are writing thousand-page gorgeous novels. Some of them are even getting adapted, and there's a movie called Alchemised that's now being made off of the book Alchemised, which is based on the fanfiction Manacled, which is based on Draco Malfoy and Hermione Granger fanfic, which is written by a queer, non-binary Asian (SenLinYu) cutie.

Anyways, when I'm reading it, it's just incredible. One, no one's making money off of this at all. Two, people are spending so much time, energy, creativity, and loyalty to their fandom to show up every week and write their thing. And there are even meme videos of AO3 authors where they'll come back and do a chapter at a time. They'll come back and be like, sorry, sorry for the hold up, I was hit by a bus, and I was in the ER for a bit, but I swear I'm back now, and the chapters will be coming, or someone's like, I'm so sorry my house burned down, or I was in prison, but I'm back and continuing the chapters.

The dedication is real, and it's really for the people. It's by the people for the people. I feel the foundation of the fanfic world is also very queer. I feel it's very BIPOC, too. I think it's people who live on the margins who are reclaiming some of the narratives from mainstream stuff, especially Harry Potter. It's, Fuck JK Rowling. But a lot of people grew up with Harry Potter, and it's so emotionally connected to them. And so the thing that fills it is the fandoms.

We can create something separate from that. It's not gonna put a single coin in JK's purse. So I think that would be the book that I would want to be- an ongoing AO3 fanfic.

I love that. I love that so much.

That's beautiful. I'm gonna wait for that if it ever comes out.