Meet JESSIE MEI LI, the star of Netflix's new action thriller who says she could beat tough guy co-star TOM HARDY in a fight
Jessie Mei Li is trying to work out the heaviest weight she could deadlift off the ground. ‘The other day I did 100kg,’ she says. ‘Three reps!’ Considering the 29-year-old is only 5ft 5in tall and weighs 60kg, that already seems like a lot. But Li is certain she could go heavier. It would, she says, depend upon how drastic the circumstances were. ‘I’m just thinking about if one of my cats was stuck under a car.’ She imagines this scenario for a while then says, quite decisively, ‘Yeah, I’ve definitely got more in me. I know that for sure.’ (Her pets – a pair of mixed-breed Maine Coon tabbies who are girls but are called Maurice and Hamish – will be relieved.)
T-shirt, trousers and trainers, Tod’s. Bracelet, Anuka x Patrick McDowell
That Li could potentially lift an entire car to save two cats is not so surprising. The actress is the star of Havoc, a police thriller with Britain’s top action actor Tom Hardy, which comes out on Netflix this month.
Hardy plays Walker, a detective gone rogue, and Li is Ellie, a newbie officer and his sidekick. The film is absolutely stuffed full of stunts. So many stunts, in fact, that Li had to do a ‘stunt’ audition, which involved running and jumping into the open window of a car, then firing through its windscreen with a shotgun. For safety reasons the car was a fake made from cardboard boxes. But still.
Some context: Li is signed to Independent (the same glitzy agency that represents Gillian Anderson, Jodie Comer and Daniel Craig) and was the lead in the Netflix series Shadow and Bone (more on this later). But prior to Havoc, she’d never done a big blockbuster. However, Hardy, 47, has had lead roles in Inception, The Dark Knight Rises and Mad Max: Fury Road – three movies that grossed in total about £1.8 billion at the box office; he was nominated for an Oscar for his performance alongside Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant and is also a trained martial artist.
Frankly he sounds like a daunting co-star, and Havoc, with its endless stunts and a reported budget of £115 million, sounds like a daunting film. But Li was unbothered. She was, in a way, born for the role.
Li is half Chinese and half English and grew up in Redhill, Surrey, alongside a younger brother, a nurse mother and solicitor father. Her dad also, as it happens, worked as a detective inspector in Hong Kong in the 1980s. (She remembers playing games with her brother as teenagers, attempting to outwit their dad. ‘If we were meeting him in a restaurant, and he had arrived first, we would try and creep up on him. But he’d always have already clocked us in the reflection of his knife or something like that.’)
Top and jumper, Alémais. Earrings, Anuka x Patrick McDowell
Mr Li watched endless action films with his children and the siblings would then spend a lot of time recreating the fight scenes. (‘I was,’ says Li, ‘a very boisterous child.’) When she was a teenager she joined self-defence classes that were a mixture of taekwondo and mixed martial arts, and loved them. From there she ‘dabbled with things’ like boxing and wing chun – a style of kung fu. ‘I used to go to wing chun classes with my cousin and they were very male-heavy – lots of police, actually.
But it’s all about using your opponent’s energy against them, so there’d be all these big men and little me, and I’d be able to, like…’ she mimes dismantling a gigantic, imaginary policeman.
It all meant that, while she had a stunt double on Havoc, there was just one shot – Li thinks – where they had to be used. It was for a scene that required rolling down a tall flight of stairs. And no one on the set, actors or stunt doubles, got injured.
If the stunt work was easy-peasy, Li found the film’s gun-training trickier. She had to spend hours inside a large shipping container, practising shooting blanks and targets. ‘I hate guns,’ she says. ‘I don’t like loud noises, and I got this terrible habit of saying “bang bang” every time I fired.’
Reshoots and complicated schedules also meant that, although Havoc is being released now, filming began in late 2021. It was at the time that Alec Baldwin fired a gun on the set of a film, Rust, and accidentally killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins. The day after the Baldwin incident, Li had to film a gun scene. ‘My character was lying flat on her back and I had to reach for the shotgun next to me, do a sit-up and then shoot down the barrel of the camera,’ she says. ‘Our lovely director of photography, Flannery, was trying to put me at ease. He was like, “I’ve got a shield up. You’re not going to hurt me. You’ll be fine.” But I was kind of freaking out because I was shooting at him.’
According to Gareth Evans, Havoc’s director, Hardy arrived on the set so muscular, ‘it was as if he was made of rock’. Li confirms her co-star’s solidity. ‘Yeah, he turned up ready to go. Like granite.’ In addition to being a film star, Hardy is a trained martial artist; in 2022, then 45, he entered the UK’s Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Open Championship and won all his matches.
Jessie in Last Night in Soho
During breaks between filming, Li remembers Hardy instigating mock jiu-jitsu tournaments with the stunt doubles – or ‘stunties’, as they’re called. ‘I’d be sat there, having my lunch, and he’d be off with the stunties having a fight.’ I ask who would win in a fight: Li or Hardy. ‘Me!’ she says, laughing. ‘He could try it, but it would definitely be me.’ After watching her launch into the air, do a high-kick and land on a crash mat, over and over and over again at the YOU photoshoot, I believe her.
As well as encouraging cast wrestling, Hardy did a lot of ad-libbing during takes. What sort of things would he say? ‘Oh, I couldn’t possibly reveal!’ Although, if Hardy’s improvised lines were rude, so were Li’s – just unintentionally. Her character, Jessie, is mixed race and speaks some Cantonese, and Li can speak a bit of Cantonese herself. There was one line she had to shout, in Cantonese, ‘They didn’t kill your son. You’ve got the wrong man!’ The trouble is it’s a tonal language, and when Li raised her voice she would muddle the word ‘man’ – pronounced ‘yun’ – with the word ‘lun’. In Cantonese, ‘lun’ unfortunately means penis.
Li got into acting sort of by accident. After school she went to Sussex university, where she read French and Spanish, but she didn’t enjoy it and dropped out after a year and a half. She got a job as a teaching assistant and worked part-time as a waitress at Yo Sushi in Gatwick Airport.
Li also decided to take drama classes after work. She hadn’t done any acting before but, ‘I’d come out of uni, I hadn’t had the best time, and I think I just wanted to have some fun.’
Which she did. In fact, she enjoyed the classes so much that she began going to open auditions for TV shows. It was at one of these auditions that, in 2018, she met Paul Andrew Williams, a director. Although he didn’t give Li a role in one of his TV shows, Williams liked her and decided to help her. He introduced her to two agents at Independent and they signed Li for a trial six months; five years later, she’s still a client.
Jessie with co-star Archie Renaux in Shadow and Bone
‘If I hadn’t had that director and my agency taking a chance on me, then I wouldn’t be doing this,’ she says. ‘I feel quite lucky because, a lot of the time, you’ve either got to be a nepo baby or have gone to drama school. It’s so much harder if you don’t have those avenues.’
In January 2019, Li got her first professional job, in a West End adaptation of the 1950 film All About Eve. Quite a starry West End adaptation, too. Li played Claudia Caswell – the role performed in the original film by Marilyn Monroe – and her co-stars included Gillian Anderson and Lily James. The singer P J Harvey composed the production’s score.
Was she nervous for the first day of rehearsals? ‘I don’t really get nervous,’ she says. ‘I know that sounds like a mad thing to say, but I just don’t! I feel like, “You gave me this job because you thought that I belong here, so this is where I belong”.’ It helped that the cast were kind. Anderson, says Li, was ‘like a mother hen’ – she would bring in cakes and doughnuts for everyone.
After that, Li got a small role in Edgar Wright’s ghostly horror film Last Night in Soho, and then she was cast as the lead in the Netflix show Shadow and Bone, based on a series of books for teenagers and young adults, written by the Israeli-American author Leigh Bardugo. The story is set in a fantasy world called ‘the Grishaverse’, follows a group of magic people, and is, frankly, too strange and complicated to explain in a paragraph. Anyway, the novels were gigantic on BookTok, sold 20 million copies and were translated into nearly 50 languages. The fan base was so dedicated that they worked out Li had been cast as the heroine before it was announced; they spotted that she followed Bardugo and the series’ showrunner on Twitter and conclusions were jumped to.
As rookie police officer Ellie in the upcoming film Havoc, with Tom Hardy playing troubled detective Walker
Shadow and Bone was filmed in Hungary, had an estimated budget of around £3 million per episode, ran for two seasons between 2021 and 2023 and amassed a total of 292.4 million viewing hours on Netflix. It also made Li very well known to a very large group of young people. On Instagram – where she has 618,000 followers – there are fan accounts dedicated to her with names like ‘Jessie Mei Li Updates’ and ‘Jessie Mei Li Style’.
After Havoc is released, Li is going to Hong Kong for three months to film a project. She can’t say anything about it except that it’s not action-y and she’s having to get a full set of long hair extensions for the role. When she’s there, she’s meeting up with several of the Hong Kong-native stunties that she met on the set of Havoc.
Li is funny and very good company. She’s also candid, which is unusual for young and normally media-trained actors. Near the end of our conversation she says that, after Shadow and Bone finished, there was a two-year period where she didn’t work much. ‘There was so much rejection.’ It got to a point where she thought, “Maybe it’s not for me.”’
Now that Havoc is coming out, however, Li feels like ‘the ball is rolling. I have that sense of future and getting things in control. Looking back, I feel really lucky, actually, to have had a very quiet two years. It meant that I ironed out a lot of the creases in my life and now I’m in a position where I feel incredibly ready to go.’ She pauses. ‘And I’m going! And you can’t stop me!’
Havoc will be streaming on Netflix from Friday 25 April
The 7 biggest action films coming this year
- Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (May) Tom Cruise returns as Ethan Hunt, racing to save humanity from an evil AI entity
- Thunderbolts (May) Another Marvel superhero flick, this time with Florence Pugh and Sebastian Stan
- Ballerina (June) Ana de Armas stars as a female assassin in this John Wick spin-off
- F1 (June) The starry cast of this racing blockbuster includes Brad Pitt (right) and Javier Bardem
- Jurassic World Rebirth (July) The latest in the epic chomp-romp franchise features Scarlett Johansson and Jonathan Bailey
- Caught Stealing (August) Austin Butler and Zoë Kravitz take on the criminal underworld of 1990s New York
- Predator: Badlands (November) Details of this follow-up are hush-hush, but Elle Fanning stars – and fans also predict that Arnold Schwarzenegger will be back
Action movies in numbers
- They are the most popular UK genre, bringing in £297m per year at the box office – five times as much as second-place comedy films
- The three biggest-ever box office smashes, Avatar (above), Avengers Endgame and Avatar: The Way of Water, are all action films, together grossing more than £6bn
Mad Max: Fury Road is the most awarded action film of all time, bagging ten Oscar nominations and six gongs
Fast & Furious (above) is the most successful action franchise ever, with ten films raking in more than £7bn globally
Star Wars: the Force Awakens is the highest-grossing film ever, pulling in more than £725m in 2015
The Dark Knight (2008, above) is the most critically acclaimed action film ever with a 94 per cent Rotten Tomatoes score
Wonder Woman (2017) made £690m globally, making it the top-grossing female-directed action film
James Bond is the longest running action franchise: 25 films over more than 60 years
Picture director: Ester Malloy. Stylist: Joanne M Kennedy.
Hair: Sven Bayerbach at Carol Hayes using Hair By Sam
Mcknight. make-up: Caroline Barnes.
netflix, alamy
