Poppy Liu

Poppy Liu’s got this wild, globe-hopping story—born in Xi’An, China, then splitting her childhood between Minnesota’s snow and Shanghai’s neon chaos. She started performing crazy young, like, age four, getting her groove on with traditional Chinese dance for a whole decade. By 14, boom, she’s in Shanghai, switching over to theater. Fast forward to her twenties, and she’s hustling in New York, right in the thick of the downtown theater and puppetry scene (yeah, puppetry, not everyone has that on their resume). Film came next, and it wasn’t some paint-by-numbers entry—she linked up with Chinese American and women indie filmmakers, kicking off with her own narrative short, Names of Women, in 2017. She didn’t just drop the film and bounce; she went on tour, hitting up colleges and conferences all over. Then came Mercy Mistress, which is basically a viral web series about a Chinese American dominatrix—Poppy isn’t just in it, she’s the star, Mistress Yin, and it took off online. 2018, she crashes into network TV with New Amsterdam on NBC, and by 2019, she’s a regular on Sunnyside, even landing props from TVLine as a Fall TV Breakout Star. The big one? 2021, she shows up in HBO Max’s Hacks, which got all the critics buzzing. She’s not just bouncing from project to project—she’s leaving a mark, and honestly, it’s all pretty badass.