“Anyone else a little obsessed with Daisy Jones & The Six?” Simu Liu captioned a video he uploaded to his Instagram account on Mar. 20. In the short clip, Simu, 33, sits in a plain white t-shirt and jeans in what appears to be his music room. After the Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings leans back, he strums an acoustic guitar before launching into a heartfelt rendition of “Honeycomb,” a song from the show. “We can make a good thing bad,” he sang, nailing the notes – and the audition if ever there was a Daisy Jones & The Six live tour.
“Is there anything you can’t do?????” commented Taylor Jenkins Reid, the author of the 2019 novel Daisy Jones & The Six is adapted from. Jenkins, 39, also wrote the 2016 novel, One True Loves, which was adapted into a film hitting theatres on Apr. 7. Simu plays Sam, one of the leads, opposite Phillipa Soo and Luke Bracey.
One True Loves “tells a moving love story about a woman unexpectedly forced to choose between the husband she has long thought dead and the fiancé who finally has brought her back to life,” according to Deadline. The role as a romantic lead will allow Simu to spread his wings and continue to expand Asian visibility in cinema.
“Coming off of an action/martial arts spectacle like Shang-Chi, I knew that much of the world was going to expect me to do more kung fu films,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “It’s always been important to me to constantly challenge people’s perceptions of myself, as well as of Asian people as a whole. While I celebrate legendary actors such as Jackie Chan, Jet Li, and Bruce Lee, I know that my path is very different. I am not a master of kung-fu, after all; I am an actor who trained very hard to embody the character that I was hired to play. As such, I’m beyond excited to step into Sam’s shoes for this movie that I am deeply in love with.”
In the 2016 novel, the main characters are not Asian, and Simu is thankful for a chance to show that people who looked like him could embody that kind of role. “When I read the script, I loved the arc between Sam and Emma, and I felt that our ethnicities brought an added layer of depth to the story that wouldn’t have been there otherwise. And so, I chose!” he told THR. “On our first Zoom call, I thanked Taylor for being willing to imagine a different Sam than she had initially written, and she looked at me like I was speaking in another language. She said that from the moment the idea had been presented to her, I became her one and only Sam. It truly meant the world to hear that!”