By Caroline Huckeba
Photographer: Joa Frey // Creative Director, Stylist: Freya Monro Morrison // Hair Stylist: Sky Kim // Makeup Artist: Kevin Cheah // Photo Assistant: Karly Lamoreaux // Executive Producer: Harrison Woodard // Producer: Myah Wittke // Editor: Caroline Huckeba // PR: Haley Anderson, Imprint PR
The actor behind Street Fighter and Presence is learning that the closer she gets to understanding her characters, the more she discovers about herself.
For Callina Liang, acting began with a language she didn't yet know how to speak.
Growing up in Beijing, Liang started learning English when she was 10, when her family moved to Australia and enrolled her in an English-speaking school. She remembers arriving in a classroom where everyone seemed to understand something she couldn't. She was shy and making friends rarely came easily. Then she took a drama class.
“They made us play this miming, like, improv exercise,” she recalls. “And for that entire class, I just remember feeling so free, had so much fun. And for once, language wasn't a barrier for me to express myself.”
It was a small revelation that would eventually change the course of her life. By 15 or 16, Liang was trying to convince her father to let her pursue acting full-time. At 17, she left high school for drama school, trading the conventional path for one that offered no guarantees.
Looking back, she can see how much that first experience shaped the person she would become. Her friends, she says, have always considered her dramatic. They can tell when something is bothering her, even when she thinks she's hiding it.
“Maybe it's because I started learning the language simultaneously while taking drama classes and really picking up an interest in that,” she says. “Maybe that made me into a dramatic person, and I can never hide my emotions.”
Then, with a laugh, she settles on a more straightforward description: “I think I'm expressive.”
In Steven Soderbergh's Presence, Liang plays a teenager navigating an emotionally complicated family dynamic inside a house haunted by an unseen presence. In Street Fighter, she takes on Chun-Li, one of gaming's most recognizable female fighters, transforming her body through months of intensive physical training.
The performances might appear to belong to entirely different worlds. But for Liang, both required the same thing: finding a way into a character that initially seemed far removed from herself.
“When I was younger, it was definitely a form of escapism,” she says of acting. “I get to be in someone else's shoes. I get to completely detach myself from the character and just pretend to be someone else.”
That understanding began to change when she attended the Stella Adler Studio of Acting in New York. One exercise, in particular, has stayed with her. At the beginning of class, her acting coach would ask each student to tell him one truth about themselves. It could be anything. The assignment sounded simple enough. Instead, it forced Liang to confront how often she had been avoiding her own feelings.
“I found out how much I was lying to myself as a human being,” she says. “And I think a lot of people do that.”
For Liang, acting stopped being about escaping herself and became something closer to an investigation. Even when she plays someone unlike herself, she is drawing on her own experiences, her own understanding of the world, and her own emotional history. The character might be fictional, but the material she uses to bring that person to life is not.
“It's more like taking your experiences and how you view life and how you've experienced the human condition and alchemizing it and putting it into what's written on the page,” she explains.
The realization changed more than her approach to acting. She remembers entering the program in 2019 as one person and leaving as someone else entirely. The process forced her to acknowledge things she had pushed aside, including feelings she had dismissed as simply part of being an anxious person.
“It kind of taught me to face myself at my truest, rawest form,” she says.
For Liang, this is part of what makes the profession addictive. There is no final version of herself to arrive at, no point at which she will have experienced enough of life to exhaust what she can bring to a role.
“I will never ever master the craft,” she says. “Acting is one thing that you will just keep getting better at as you go through more enriched life experiences.”
And sometimes, she discovers something unexpected about herself through a character she initially struggles to understand.
When Liang was cast as Chun-Li in Street Fighter, she couldn't immediately see what she had in common with the legendary martial artist. Chun-Li is stubborn, formidable, and capable of taking down an entire room of opponents.
“She's a professional martial artist. She walks into a room, she can kill everybody in there,” she says. “She is also described as the strongest woman in the world, which is, you know, not me.”
But the more she researched Chun-Li and thought about her outside the context of a video game, the more familiar she became. Both had been raised by their fathers. Both could be stubborn, emotional, dramatic, and quick to frustration. Liang began thinking less about Chun-Li as an icon and more about her as a person: how she might feel, how she would process her emotions, and what might exist beneath her physical strength.
“I kind of dove into her and humanized her,” Liang says. “I'm like, 'Oh, we're kind of similar.'”
The physical transformation required to play Chun-Li was another education in what Liang could do. Suddenly, she had to learn how to move like a professional fighter, build strength, and master choreography that included nunchucks, all on an unforgiving schedule.
At first, she found herself getting frustrated when she couldn't pick up a movement immediately. Her trainer repeatedly reminded her to relax and breathe. Eventually, she began to understand that tension was making the process harder.
“I learned that I was a fast learner,” she says. “As soon as I kind of relaxed and trusted in my body, I was able to do it.”
The experience taught her something that went beyond the demands of a film production: the distance between what she thought she was capable of and what she could actually accomplish was larger than she had imagined.
“If you just believe in your body, you are capable of much more than you think you are,” she says.
During the Street Fighter shoot, she established a routine that gave her a way to return to herself at the end of each day. After filming, she would take a magnesium bath, partly to soothe her exhausted muscles and prevent injuries, but also to create a little space between the person she had been playing and the person she was when she got home.
“I do journal a lot,” she says. “I think it's having those little pockets of sacred moments for yourself.”
She would spend 10 to 15 minutes practicing breathwork, sitting with herself before going to sleep and starting the process again the following day.
Outside of acting, she's a devoted gamer, often logging on to play with friends on Discord, many of whom she has never met in person.
“I do just love logging on, shutting my brain off,” she says of gaming.
She reads novels, particularly fantasy and psychological thrillers, enjoys walking and shopping, and spends time at home with her two cats, whom she calls her babies.
When asked how her definition of success has changed as her profile has grown, she doesn't describe a new ambition or a particular milestone she hopes to reach. Instead, she returns to the craft itself, to the understanding that acting isn't linear and that one job cannot promise what comes next.
“No matter how big or small the next project is, I'm going to put in the same amount of heart, same amount of dedication,” she says. “I go into every single audition just trying my hardest, trying my best. And that's all I can do.”