Marvel actor on success, investing in Asian American startups
Simu Liu speaks on stage during the People’s Choice Awards on Feb. 18, 2024, in Santa Monica, California.
Rich Polk| NBCUniversal | Getty Images
Marvel’s first Asian superhero star, Simu Liu, says he hit “rock bottom” before finding “enlightenment” as an actor — after his career as an accountant was a flop.
“I spent maybe the first 22 years of my life trying to live somebody else’s definition of success,” he told CNBC’s Samantha Vadas. “In the process of losing my job and kind of hitting a rock bottom, but then ultimately being liberated from that idea allowed me to define success on my own terms,” he said.
Liu was born in China and moved to Canada as a child. In 2011, he joined accounting firm Deloitte in Toronto, losing his job after eight months when he “skipped work” to take a role as an extra in the action movie “Pacific Rim,” according to his LinkedIn profile. “Suffered an existential crisis that led to enlightenment regarding the definition of success on one’s own terms. Became an actor instead,” Liu’s profile states.
When he was starting out as a “struggling actor,” he would take bit parts. “I was auditioning for roles with no names, you know, ‘desktop number one,’ ‘paramedic number three,’ and that was kind of it for people who looked like me,” he told CNBC.
“We were not the main characters of our own … story, by any means. And fast forward to 2018 when a movie like ‘Crazy Rich Asians,’ you know, comes out and really shakes the world,” Liu said. “Crazy Rich Asians” was Hollywood’s first movie release to feature a mostly Asian cast since 1993’s “The Joy Luck Club.”
In 2019, Liu was cast as the star of Marvel’s “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings,” and in the same year, “Saturday Night Live” cast its first Asian member, Chinese American actor Bowen Yang.
Simu Liu stars as Shang-Chi in Marvel’s “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.”
Disney
“We have an Asian … superhero, but we also have, you know, an Asian cast member on SNL. We have incredible Asian stand-up comedians we have, you know, Asian movies like ‘Minari’ and ‘The Farewell’ and ‘Past Lives’,” Liu said. These movies explore the experience of “growing up in between cultures and generations and languages,” he said. In 2023, Liu played a prominent “Ken” character in the movie “Barbie,” which broke box-office records, and in May he starred in the movie “Atlas,” with Jennifer Lopez.
More recently, Liu has added a new string to his bow: investing. Earlier this year, he became a general partner at Markham Valley Ventures, a firm that invests in Asian American and Pacific Islander startups.
“I graduated with a degree in finance and accounting, and I worked at Deloitte for a shockingly short amount of time before I was fired. But I think, you know, getting into this world is a … natural progression for my career,” he told CNBC.
‘Representative of our community’
Liu is an investor and chief content officer at MiLa, a Chinese soup dumpling company founded by Chinese American entrepreneurs Jennifer Liao and Caleb Wang and based in Seattle.
When he looks to invest, he considers how the business operates, its founder and the product itself, he said. “And then … in order for me to put my name behind it, I think, you know, I would love for it to be something uplifting or something representative of our community,” he told CNBC.
With MiLa, Liu hopes to encourage people less familiar with Asian food to “be more curious, to engage with our community,” he said.
Liu described himself as being “outspoken” about discrimination against Asian Americans. As a child of immigrants, he said, he feels as though he inherited his parents’ “sense of smallness, of saying, ‘Oh, we don’t want to cause trouble. We just want to … put our head down and do work.”
“For people in my generation and for our future generations to thrive, you know, we need to be more outspoken,” Liu said.
“I really gravitate to this quote, which is … ‘Be who, be the person that you needed when you were a kid’.’ And I think for me, that person was somebody who was confident, who was assertive, and who wasn’t afraid to speak up, and who wasn’t afraid to be unapologetically and proudly who they were.
Disclosure: NBCUniversal is the parent company of CNBC and NBC, which broadcasts “Saturday Night Live.”