Liu Xueyi spent a decade playing gods; an unlikeable mortal made him a lead

Liu Xueyi

Photo: 刘学义工作室 (Official Weibo Account of Liu Xueyi Studio) / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	July 6, 1990 Qingdao, Shandong, China
Occupation	Actor
Awards	Wenrong Awards

For most of his career, the easiest way to cast Liu Xueyi was to put him above the clouds. Viewers even nicknamed him the spokesman of the three realms, because for years he seemed to play nothing but gods and demon emperors, usually the one who stands beside the hero and loses the argument, or the girl. The surprise of his current moment is that it arrived on the ground, in the house of an imperial minister, with a character audiences were at first openly inclined to dislike.

That character is Lin Jinqi, the eldest grandson of a powerful family in Against the Current, a calculating, guarded heir who carries his clan’s fortunes on his back and trusts almost nobody. When the series opened, viewers joked that he had no romantic pull at all, a leading man who would make nobody swoon. Within weeks the joke had turned: Chinese entertainment press described an actor winning a losing game on craft alone and singled out a wordless scene of jealousy midway through the run. After more than a decade of steady work, Liu was suddenly being discussed as a lead in his own right.

He grew up in Qingdao, the port city in Shandong province where he was born on 6 July 1990, and left home young to study. At fifteen he moved to Beijing to train in classical dance, five years of it, before switching to acting; he entered the Central Academy of Drama in 2010 and graduated in 2014. The dancer’s training never left the screen work. It shows in the way he holds still, which turned out to be his most useful skill in a genre that asks its actors to stand in front of a wind machine and look eternal.

His screen debut came in the historical drama Shangguan Wan’er, and The Legend of Xiao Zhuang gave him the Mongol prince Ejei Khan. The first role that made audiences learn his name was Xiao Yicai, the senior disciple of the Qingyun sect in The Legend of Chusen, a polished, ambitious young man whose loyalties bend when it suits him. The Destiny of White Snake then handed him two parts at once, the demon emperor Zhan Huang and the Heavenly Emperor, and the second of them was popular enough to earn its own spin-off film.

The pattern hardened with Love and Redemption, the fantasy romance that fixed him in the genre. He played Hao Chen, the cool senior disciple who is also the god Bailin, the story’s real antagonist, a man so sure of his own righteousness that he becomes the thing the heroes must defeat. Ancient Love Poetry followed with another double role, the god Tian Qi and the demon lord Jing Yuan. Fans began calling him the gods’ go-to actor. The label was affectionate, and it was also a cage. In xianxia, the romantic hero is the role that sells the show, and Liu kept playing the other man, the one with the more interesting arc and the smaller billing.

He spent the next stretch showing he could do something else. In The Blood of Youth he took a special-starring part as Wuxin, a young monk, and his shaved head became a talking point. He was the scheming Luo Zishang in Destined and a scientist, Ji Danyang, in the espionage drama Unshakable Faith. Lead billing followed. In In Blossom, a mystery romance opposite Ju Jingyi, he played Pan Yue, the fiancé suspected of murder. In Kill Me Love Me he was Murong Jinghe, a crippled prince who secretly runs the assassins’ guild sent to kill him. In A Moment But Forever, opposite Tiffany Tang, he played the fox-clan high priest Yuan Zhong, the part that won him the Glory Young Drama Actor of the Year prize at the 11th Wenrong Awards in 2025.

The leading-man years did not read as a triumph while they were happening. In 2025 a widely shared Chinese industry piece called him the year’s biggest flop, setting the viewing numbers of What If, Kill Me Love Me and A Moment But Forever against the size of the productions and the fame of his co-stars. Love Never Fails, shot years earlier and shelved until 2025, aired to little notice. The verdict was that he had been handed leads and had not carried them. It was harsh, and it missed something plain in the work. The parts he made memorable were rarely the romantic heroes. They were the compromised men, the righteous god who turns villain, the wounded prince who is also the assassins’ master. Chinese costume romance rewards the actor who can be adored on sight. Liu’s gift has always been for characters who have to be understood first, a slower sell, and a poor fit for the opening-week figures by which these shows are judged.

Against the Current is where that slower sell finally paid off. Directed by Huang Yingxiang and Chen Dan from He Yanshan’s novel Lan Xiang Yuan, the series premiered on 11 September 2026 on CCTV-8 and Tencent Video, with Tan Songyun as a noblewoman who survives her family’s ruin by taking a servant’s name and entering the Lin household. Its first day was one of the strongest openings on Tencent this year, and the show has reached viewers outside China through Rakuten Viki and Disney+ in selected regions. Opinion on the series itself remains split, with complaints about preachy dialogue and slow pacing, but the argument about Lin Jinqi has gone the other way. A man first dismissed as cold has become the reason many viewers keep watching, and Liu’s older series have climbed back up the platform charts in his wake.

He keeps his private life out of the conversation and uses his public accounts mostly to tease his own characters. When the plot had Lin Jinqi faint in a delivery room, Liu insisted on Weibo that the man had not fainted at all; he was only resting his eyes for a moment.

The next test of his new standing is already in production. In Jiangshan Datong, a state-backed historical drama about the Northern Wei directed by Yan Jiangang, he plays Emperor Tuoba Jun, sharing top billing with Yang Mi and Hu Jun; no release date has been announced. Tuoba Jun is a ruler who dies young and leaves his work to his widow. For an actor who spent a decade being cast as gods, it is a chance to play power that is human and brief, and this time the man in the crown is the lead.

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Tags: actors, Against the Current, Liu Xueyi, Tan Songyun, In Blossom, Kill Me Love Me

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