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.
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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.
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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.
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