Tian Xiwei, the Pursuit of Jade star who now has to play her own impostor

Tian Xiwei

Photo: TV10 / Ten Asia / CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	October 14, 1997 Tongliang, Chongqing, China
Occupation	Actress
Awards	Global OTT Awards · iQIYI Scream Night · Weibo Awards · Tencent Video Star Awards

In the first week of Where the Mask Ends, the same face sits on both sides of the feud. Tian Xiwei plays A Chou, a noble daughter swapped as a baby who grows up emptying night soil in the streets, and she also plays Wei Rao, the impostor raised in silk who sends her double to the altar in her place. A role like that settles whether an actress is a type or a range. It reaches Tian at the exact moment Chinese television has decided she is its most bankable type: the quick, low-born girl who ends up inside a marriage she never chose.

That type has carried her a long way, and fast, but it is not where she started. Her first parts were quiet girls and second leads in youth series, and she spent her early twenties working her way up through the streaming platforms that now build their seasons around her.

She comes from Tongliang, a district on the western edge of Chongqing, where she was born on October 14, 1997; in interviews she still credits the city for her appetite for spicy food. She studied drama at the Shanghai Theatre Academy and landed her first lead at 21, in the iQIYI youth drama Waiting for You in a Long Time, as Luo Xi, a withdrawn university student carrying a secret from high school.

The next steps were supporting parts. She played Xi Shan, a newcomer to the real estate business, opposite Angelababy and Deng Lun in My True Friend, then took a role in the historical romance The Song of Glory. Her part as Huang Chengzi in Lovely Us was the one that made audiences learn her name, and a run of streaming rom-coms followed, from Be My Cat to My Fated Boy and Ms. Cupid in Love.

The break came with New Life Begins, the iQIYI period comedy she led with Bai Jingting. She played Li Wei, a young woman of modest means who wants nothing more than to dodge a politically arranged marriage and go home, and who instead builds a life beside a reserved young master who would rather not be noticed either. The series became one of the fastest on iQIYI to reach a popularity index of 10,000, and it brought her the platform’s Potential Actress of the Year honour at its Scream Night ceremony. The industry began filing her among the post-95 generation of young actresses expected to carry the next decade.

What followed shows how quickly a hit hardens into a template. Wrong Carriage, Right Groom puts the premise in its title: a bride climbs into the wrong sedan. Romance on the Farm made her a resourceful country girl. Guardians of the Dafeng, the Tencent Video fantasy adventure she led with Wang Hedi, passed a popularity index of 30,000, and Moonlit Reunion paired her with Xu Kai. In between she took a contemporary relationship drama, In Between, and voiced Sophie in the Mandarin dub of Hayao Miyazaki‘s Howl’s Moving Castle.

Pursuit of Jade was the one that crossed the border. As Fan Changyu, a butcher’s daughter who handles a cleaver better than most men handle a sword, she enters a marriage of convenience with the marquis Xie Zheng, played by Zhang Linghe, to protect her family, and later turns into a warrior when war arrives; she trained in martial arts for the part. Within a week of its premiere the series passed a heat index of 31,000 on Tencent Video and 10,000 on iQIYI, and Netflix, which carried it abroad, saw it reach sixth place in its global Top 10 for non-English shows. In June it won her the People’s Choice Award at the Global OTT Awards in South Korea.

Line those hits up, though, and the shape repeats: a clever heroine of low standing, a marriage made by arrangement or by mistake, a man who learns to respect her. In August, internet users circulated a collage showing her with the same straight fringe across sixteen dramas. It looked like a joke about a haircut. The complaint underneath was that her characters had begun to blur into one another. Her studio answered calmly that she could be pretty with bangs or without them, smiling or not, and that someone will always find you the most beautiful person in the room. It was a gracious reply, and it addressed the beauty question rather than the casting one. Where the Mask Ends is where the casting question gets tested, and the first verdicts are split. The drama blog A Koala’s Playground called early reviews mixed and found viewers warmer to her as the poor heroine than as the villain, while CCTV’s entertainment coverage praised the way she separates the two women through her voice alone.

The year has been the busiest of her career. In February she sang at the CCTV Spring Festival Gala, the most watched broadcast in the country. In May came Born with Luck, a crime comedy with Wang Xiao that aired on iQIYI and CCTV, and in August Genius Girlfriend, opposite Hu Yitian, in which she plays Lin Zhixia, a prodigy for whom people are harder to read than equations. The character topped the VLinkage index of drama characters, and when viewers wrote to her about being shut out at school, she told them that life has no standard answer. Where the Mask Ends premiered on October 16, two days after her 29th birthday, on CCTV-8 and Youku in China and on Netflix abroad. Written by Zhou Mo, the screenwriter of Story of Yanxi Palace, it ranked first on Yunhe Data’s chart of long-form dramas on October 19.

Off screen she is Gucci’s brand ambassador in China, a role that took her to the house’s show at Milan Fashion Week and drew crowds to its Marina Bay Sands boutique in Singapore. Guerlain and the phone maker Vivo have also signed her.

The next answer is already in production. The Winner, a contemporary suspense series that began filming in Xiamen in August, pairs her with Wei Daxun and gives Kara Wai, a three-time best actress at the Hong Kong Film Awards, a special appearance. On Tian’s birthday Wai posted a photo of the two of them and promised they would work together again. The story, adapted from a novel, turns on a small-town girl whose life crosses with an heiress’s, another swapped identity, this time without the palace, the sedan or the arranged bride. No release date has been announced.

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Tags: actors, actresses, Tian Xiwei, Where the Mask Ends, Bai Jingting, Guardians of the Dafeng

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