Simu Liu on Last Breath, new drama about saturation divers, and being an Asian role model

It has been a heady couple of years for actor Simu Liu. After years of playing bit parts in films and recurring roles on television, the Canadian played the title character in Marvel blockbuster Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. Next, he was an antagonistic Ken to Ryan Gosling’s “Beach Ken” in the US$1 billion hit musical Barbie. Liu’s latest part is in the survival drama Last Breath, which is based on a real-life accident in 2012 in which diver Chris Lemons (played by Finn Cole) became trapped 100 metres below the surface of the North Sea. When Lemons’ connection to a surface support vessel was cut, he was left alone with a 10-minute supply of oxygen. The movie, adapted by filmmaker Alex Parkinson from his 2019 documentary of the same name, recounts the daring effort to rescue him, with Woody Harrelson and Liu playing Lemons’ partners, Duncan Allcock and David Yuasa. To portray Yuasa, Liu had to take an intensive course in saturation diving. Workers repairing pipelines and cables on the ocean floor stay for weeks at a time in pressurised diving bells, breathing in a helium-heavy atmosphere. They need four days to return to the surface to avoid the “bends”, where deadly nitrogen bubbles form in the blood stream. “I didn’t have to decompress in the same way that sat[uration] divers have to,” Liu tells the Post in an interview in New York. “We were about 35 feet, or 11 metres, deep. Sat divers can work hundreds of feet down.” Filming took place both in the North Sea and in Malta. “We shot in a tank in Malta,” Liu says. “Over the course of three weeks, we’d go in as soon as it was dusk and shoot through the night. Until the sun came up. We had safety intervals, of course, but generally we’d be down there nine or ten hours at a time.” Liu and Cole wore the same suits saturation divers use, including massive metal helmets that had to be attached with winches. “It’s very heavy, as you can see,” Liu says, picking a helmet up from a table. “Plus, you’re wearing two oxygen tanks on your back. “Then they attach weights to your boots so you can walk on the sea floor.” Liu’s action scenes in Shang-Chi were exceptional, but despite his workouts and training, he was not prepared for how challenging diving was. “Just the endurance,” he explains. “Filming for hours at a time. It’s one thing to dive off the coast of Mexico where it’s nice and sunny, like a 40-minute dive where you get to swim with sea turtles. “For sat divers, it’s very, very unglamorous. You’re working on the bottom of the ocean with zero- or next-to-zero visibility, and all you’ve got in front of you is something like a piece of pipe that you have to work on for seven or eight hours.” He adds: “The hunger you experience is unlike any hunger that I’ve ever felt before. Finn will tell you, too. Emerging out of the sea after many, many hours just made me want to eat. “I’ve never been a huge fan of fast food – well, that’s a lie. I like fast food, but the degree to which I craved KFC, and how quickly I could eat like six pieces of chicken, was wild and kind of terrifying.” As Liu points out, effects artists have a number of tools to simulate diving on film, like “wet for dry” shooting. The actor believes filming underwater added a layer of authenticity to Last Breath that could not be achieved with visual effects. Saturation diving also demands extreme safety measures. “It takes an absolute village to keep divers alive that far below sea level,” he says. “The amount of crew and staff is actually similar to what it takes on a movie set, where just to get two people in a frame requires dozens of people working lighting, camera, sound, and all these other departments.” Liu himself struggled for years to break into show business and become one of those in the frame. He detailed those efforts in We Were Dreamers: An Immigrant Superhero Origin Story, an engaging memoir published in 2022. In it, he wrote about living with his grandparents in Harbin, China, after his parents emigrated to Canada. Joining them several years later, Liu grew up into what he described as a “problem child”. “I wrote We Were Dreamers on the cusp of the Shang-Chi release,” Liu says. “I wanted it to be conversational in tone, but it was important to me to be as honest as possible.” As a writer, Liu is funny, informal and surprisingly hard on himself. He does not shy away from describing intensely embarrassing situations. He is candid about how much he hated business school, and his disastrous career as an accountant. But readers can see that he approached acting with an attention to detail that would have impressed his college teachers. We Were Dreamers includes solid advice for anyone aspiring to a creative career. Here is an excellent way to deal with procrastination and self-doubt: “Owning a dream consists of two key components – declaring it to the world and taking action.” Liu broke into the entertainment industry at a time when the Asian presence in popular culture was limited. His successes helped raise awareness of the concerns of AAPI (Asian-American and Pacific Islanders). “As my platform grew, I began to realise that I had a responsibility to be an outspoken representative of our community,” he wrote. Now that Asians are cast more frequently in movies and on TV, does he still feel that obligation to increase representation? “I think that’s very much still true,” he says. “ My position now is different than five or 10 years ago in that we’ve made progress. That means a lot to me.” But the actor believes more can be done. “I want what I feel like I never had growing up. I never had maybe an aspirational role model. But I also never had anybody telling me that it was OK to be me. “Growing up Asian in a predominantly non-Asian environment, it’s really easy to feel a sense of inferiority over your culture and the colour of your skin.” Liu talks about the embarrassment of a “stinky lunch” moment at school. “Where everyone unpacks their lunch, and you’ve got something that nobody else recognises and you’re kind of chastised for it. “That creates a deep-seated shame in who you are,” he adds. “For a lot of Asian- Americans and Asian-Canadians, growing up they felt who they were was somehow ‘less than’. “If somebody, somewhere watches something that I did or said that leads them to believe that it’s OK to be who they are, OK to be proud of who they are, that they don’t need to feel ashamed, that would be so meaningful to me.” Want more articles like this? Follow SCMP Film on Facebook

Simu Liu on Last Breath, new drama about saturation divers, and being an Asian role model

Canadian actor, who stars with Woody Harrelson in film about a lost diver, tells the Post about underwater KFC pangs and making Asians proud