Talking with rising-star Natalie Hsu about fame, childhood, and the Hong Kong film industry

Alongside the cavalcade of films at this year’s New York Asian Film Festival, I was given the opportunity to interview some stars for extra coverage on Flixist. Initially, I wasn’t sure who from the list I’d like to meet with, but in my attempt to broaden my horizons about foreign cinema, I figured chatting with some younger stars would be a good course of action. As a good friend of mine has said numerous times, we should be speaking with young stars while they’re still young instead of waiting 30 years to pick their brains.

Now, the initial plan was that I’d only be chatting with rising Hong Kong starlet Natalie Hsu, but things moved quickly this year. I had met with Ms. Hsu and had a productive talk with her, but then the opportunity to speak with Hedwig Tam and Trevor Choi came up. Obviously, I couldn’t pass that, so I wound up scheduling that in for even more coverage this year.

Today, though, it’s all about Natalie Hsu and how quickly her fame has skyrocketed in the Hong Kong industry. Starting her career in 2021, she has already appeared in seven films, has another in the works, and even received a Best Actress nomination at the 43rd Hong Kong Film Awards. She did receive the “New Generation of Hong Kong Talent” award at NYAFF, at least, and it’s well-deserved. Natalie Hsu has shown she is tremendously capable and can hang with veteran actors and newcomers alike.

To kick off our brief conversation, I asked Natalie if there was any significance to her English name. For a lot of Asian actors, they select English names to not only make it easier for us stupid Americans, but because those names represent something deeper for them. In the case of Natalie, it’s actually more mundane. “Oh, actually… I’m not sure about this,” Natalie said. “My dad grew up in LA, and he always spoke English. My mom (Ed. Note: Natalie’s mother is retired actress Ann Bridgewater, who starred in films such as Full Contact and The Inspector Wears Skirts), her dad is British, so I’m pretty sure they just decided on my name for me. My dad was considering Juliet or Penelope, both of which I’m like… I’m glad it’s Natalie.”

While she isn’t too fond of the name Penelope, that actually wound up being her tooth fairy when she was younger. “I had a tooth fairy that would write letters to me every time I lost a tooth. I would put the tooth under my pillow, and she would come take it and leave me… I think a HK$20 bill, and she would write me letters as well. Then I ended up finding out that was my mom.” I’m sure we’ve all been there.

Shifting away from her home life, one of the questions I love asking any actor is how they became interested in acting. There is a rather concise explanation on Natalie’s Wikipedia page, but it doesn’t get into the minutiae of how her passion for dance wound up bringing her into the Hong Kong film industry. “I never actually considered this career. I did take drama classes at school, but they were mandatory,” she explained to me.

“In the last two years [of school], I studied IB (or International Baccalaureate). You can pick up to three specialized subjects. I picked theater as one of them because I really liked dancing. Dance is my main thing. I started ballet when I was like… two or three years old because my older sister did it. I just wanted to be like her and thought, ‘That’s really cool.’ I did it till I was 16, I think.” She doesn’t quite remember when, but around 10 or 11, she also studied contemporary dance, and this wound up getting her into competitions.

During her summers between school, she would travel the states for different competitions and conventions. This abruptly came to an end in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Leaving her stuck in Hong Kong, she began to think about her future and which schools she would apply to. Natalie had her heart set on a school in LA because of a summer program she had previously attended, but her resume wasn’t strong enough for consideration. She thought to herself, “It would be nice if I could find more jobs in Hong Kong that are fully dance-based.” Her mind went straight to commercial work.

This is where the Wikipedia entry lines up with what she told me. “A friend of a friend knew my current manager, and she was like, ‘Oh, I can hook you up with her just to see if she can keep a lookout for you.’ We had a call, and about a month later, she happened to be in China eating with the director of my first movie [Zhang Yibai],” she recounted with excitement. Zhang’s goal was to create a musical theater film, and for the past two years, he had been auditioning for the main actress role. Natalie’s agent asked if he’d like to see her competition videos, and the moment of truth came.

“I remember I was in class on my Zoom lesson, my agent said, ‘Send over your video!’ I was pretending to listen to my teacher and was like, ‘yeah!’ I was sending all the videos I could because they told me it’s really urgent. I guess this was during their lunch, and after he watched them, he set up a WeChat call. After that call on the third day, they were like, ‘Okay, you’re confirmed. You’ll come film for us.’” Naively, she assumed she would be in the background or as an extra, but fate had a different plan. Natalie would wind up as the lead actress for the film The Day We Lit Up the Sky (which, from the limited information I can find, was a modest hit in China). It jolted her straight into fame, and she hasn’t slowed down since.

Seeing as her dance background paid off so well for her first role, I asked how her training as a child helped prepare her for acting. As she noted, “I think it really helped in the sense that I can take feedback quite well. With acting, a lot of it is just: you do a take, you watch it or the director watches it, then they give you adjustments, and you go back and do it again. Dance is all about that as well.” She continued by saying that a lot of people aren’t able to take feedback like that immediately because there is so much happening on a film set.

“I remember when I was filming my first movie, I didn’t even know where the camera was and I didn’t even know we had finished the first shot. They yelled, ‘We’re done with this scene!’ And I was like, ‘Wait, where’s the camera this entire time?’” To her, that is something you simply cannot understand until you’ve been on a film set. Mix that with the mechanical nature of the feedback one typically receives, and it can be a daunting experience if you’re brand new. Natalie, however, felt that her dance background allowed her to apply feedback straight away because she was used to receiving small corrections or strict routines ahead of time. She also didn’t let anything become personal, which can sometimes happen when a director tells you a take wasn’t good enough.

Another part of Natalie’s background was from her drama classes in school. As she detailed, they were more similar to games the students would play in their free time. She vividly remembers Splat, which I had no idea what that was. Playworks.org provides a nice summary, and that helped her form bonds with her classmates. The same goes for tag, which I’m almost certain every child has played at one point or another. More pertinent to her acting career was Greek Theater, an elective that sounds outstanding. “There was one point where we each had to pick a monologue and then perform it to the class,” Natalie said. “That was one of the more serious moments of my drama class. I really, really enjoyed it and it was one of the times that I thought, ‘I really like acting.’ I still never considered it as a career to pursue.”

That is a sentiment I’ve heard many actors state across various interviews. For the most part, Natalie was not negative about her chances, just that she never thought it would happen. As with any entertainment industry, the Hong Kong film industry can be cutthroat. So many young boys and girls have dreams of entering film, and even if you’re talented, you need to have luck on your side. “It’s a lot of luck, a lot of timing, and being very serendipitous.”

For those unaware, Natalie Hsu is only 21 years old. She began her career when she was 17 and has managed to work alongside a lot of veteran Hong Kong actors (including Andy Lau, Nick Cheung, Karen Mok, and Ekin Cheng). That’s impressive for anyone, but especially someone so young. I was curious how her feelings were entering the Hong Kong film industry at such a young age, but it seems she feels her age is an asset. “Everyone kind of saw me as, like, a little sister, and I think that has allowed me to build myself up really quickly.”

She explained, “I think people would see me and say, ‘We need to take care of her because she’s so little.’ You’re not going to bully a little girl, you know. So, I think that helped a lot.” Right as she was getting into things, Natalie said that her family would ask her if anyone was being mean or targeting her. There is a stereotype that the Hong Kong film industry (or any film industry, really) is very hostile to newcomers, but Natalie has never experienced that. As she said, “Everyone has been so kind, so generous, and so humble. I think I’ve been really lucky, but also the Hong Kong circle is really lovely because it’s so small. I feel like after doing three films there, I basically knew everyone there is to know. I would do my next part and it was like, ‘Oh, it’s you again!’”

She’s already gotten off to a good start with co-stars, but I wondered if there were any actors and directors she would love to collaborate with. Kind of a generic question, but Natalie gave me a philosophical answer that I didn’t anticipate. “I really like watching films that are more arthouse or indie. Movies that are filmed in a documentary style. If you know [Irish director] Ken Loach, stuff like that. He tackles really societal topics, and a lot of them are based in the UK with actors that are not actors. They’re just people.” I brought up Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland, which Natalie was surprised to learn is not a documentary.

If that answer is a bit too deep, however, Natalie does have a more stereotypical response. “I would like to work with Peter Chan. I’d also really love to work with Andrew Lau because he is quite good friends with my mom.” Natalie laid out a timeline of events for me to explain her mom’s friendship with Andrew Lau. When her mother was working in the mid-to-late ‘80s, Lau wasn’t a full-time director yet, but still a DOP (Director of Photography). After her mom retired in 1994, she had lost touch with many of her industry friends as she focused on schooling and her family. With Natalie entering the industry, her mother has had the chance to reforge those connections through her. “It’s just so interesting to see that,” Natalie said while smiling. “I’m kind of friends with my mom’s old friends, and she says, ‘Yeah! They all like you better than they like me now.’ She jokes that I’ve stolen all of them.”

Now, one of my burning questions for any up-and-coming actor is whether they would like to do action. I’m a big action head and, having previously hosted a column dedicated to the old Hong Kong action films I grew up watching, I’d obviously love to see any new star make some action films. Natalie was technically in one already, Dante Lam’s 2023 crime thriller Bursting Point, but she hasn’t starred in an action role or had the chance to show off any action chops. That will probably change in the future, as she told me some of her background at school included taking martial arts classes.

“I would definitely like to try action because I learned martial arts when I was at school. It was an obligatory class, which sounds very Chinese,” she chuckled. “I really liked it and I liked it as much as dancing, but then there came a point where I was really busy with after-school activities, and I had to pick between them. I ended up picking dancing, but martial arts was a really big part of my life.” She noted that as part of her lessons, she and her classmates would be separated into teams to compete. If you were extremely skilled, you’d end up traveling the world for competitions. She did attend one of the competitions in Beijing, China, one year, something that inspired her to practice Wushu. Ultimately, dance was her preferred sport, and she focused on that moving forward.

As most fans of Hong Kong films are aware, martial arts is very similar to dance. Natalie even said that her dance background would make it pretty easy to transition into action, of which I reminded her that some of the biggest starlets in China and Hong Kong didn’t have formal martial arts training. Michelle Yeoh is known as being a Kung Fu goddess, but her discipline was in dance. Action has also crossed into other genres, extending beyond popcorn flicks to include even arthouse films. There are plenty of different avenues one can take, and it seems as if Natalie Hsu would like to follow that road.

With action comes high expectations from audiences, something that the Hong Kong crowd is known to have. Since Natalie is so new, I was curious how she handled those expectations when embarking on new projects. “Ever since I entered the industry, I’ve realized that audiences change their tastes so fast. It’s not really that they have high expectations, but more that what they enjoy and what they find pleasant to watch changes so quickly. You might have a script one year, then you film it and edit it, and by the time it’s ready to release, people don’t even want that kind of thing anymore.”

One aspect of Hong Kong’s film industry that Natalie has noticed is that the older generation has been very supportive of new voices coming in. As she tells me, it’s a culture called “Bong san ge,” and it shows in how much effort people have been putting in with not only balancing audience tastes, but trying new things. As she said, “Making a good film is one thing, but a good film that is also relevant and about something: that is what people these days are interested in.”

That type of mentality is likely what led to Natalie being nominated for a Best Actress award for her role in Last Song for You. Featured at this year’s NYAFF, Last Song for You is similar to For Alice in that it pairs a veteran HK actor with a newcomer to create a story about passing the torch and reforging lost connections. Natalie stars alongside Ekin Cheng, who old-school Kung Fu fans will recognize from Young and Dangerous and A Man Called Hero. While it’s shocking at any age to receive a “Best” nomination, it has to be especially surprising when you’re so new to the industry. As you can imagine, Natalie was practically blindsided by the announcement.

“It was wild. Really, because I never ever saw myself in this industry. I was very disconnected from anything happening in the industry growing up. I wouldn’t read the news or keep up with entertainment news, so I didn’t even know awards were a thing,” she told me. “My director was on the plane [the day the nomination was announced], and he had bought Wi-Fi to watch the livestream. I didn’t want to watch it because I really didn’t have any expectations of being nominated. There were so many incredible films this year, so I thought to myself, ‘It’s fine. I’m just gonna remember it was Valentine’s Day.’”

Since there was a press tour going on for awards season, Natalie had gone to her talent agency’s office to pick up some gifts as the announcements were being made. All the managers and assistants were glued to the stream with bated breath as Natalie and her mom went to use the bathroom. As she recalls, the timing seemed almost too perfect as she and her mother stepped into the bathroom right as the office erupted in cheers. “Even after hearing that, we both thought, ‘It’s probably not me.’ I don’t know what’s wrong with the two of us. We were literally making excuses. We just didn’t believe it.”

The reality didn’t sink in for a few weeks either. As Natalie said to me, she felt like she was dreaming for the next few weeks. I imagine hearing news like that when you’re so fresh in the industry feels surreal at first. She eventually let the news settle and has been grateful ever since. “I am very, very grateful and honored because I was alongside four incredible actresses.” Even if she ultimately lost out, her name will forever be in the conversation as a contender against some titans, which is fantastic for her future prospects.

I said it way above, but the reason I wanted to interview Natalie Hsu is that she is still so fresh in Hong Kong’s film industry. She offered me some great insight into how the business works and what she hopes to achieve, and I’m proud to have been able to give her a spotlight on Flixist. Maybe this isn’t the biggest site around, but putting this information out in English will hopefully lead to other sites finding it and passing her information around. In my outside work doing commentary tracks, I’ve found it tremendously difficult to even source information about Asian media, so I’d like to change that.

Anyway, it was an honor to talk with Natalie, and I hope she will stick around in the film industry for decades to come. Hopefully in the future, I’ll review a film of hers for Flixist, and then she can email me and tell me I suck if I don’t like something. I’ll be fine with that outcome.