“The lie of capitalism is that it is every man out for himself. It’s violence to deplete people of a sense of imagination that the world can be different,” Poppy Liu declares to me over a salad lunch at a hotel in Manhattan, preaching to the choir. The actress’s superpower is swerving between “seize the means of production” rhetoric like this and irreverent gay slang. As she speaks, light-green glitter twinkles in the corner of her eyes, matching her chiffon blouse. Her long, jet-black braids brush the floor. I half-expect her to lasso them around a would-be assassin hiding across the room. “Glam is always drag,” she purrs. “My day-to-day I look like a 13-year-old twink. I feel unclockable.”
Liu’s backstory is like one of those folk tales about a humble warrior-princess who rises up to slay the forces of darkness. Some of the horrors she’s survived include a “diet cult leader thing in Brazil,” an avant-garde puppetry phase, and a co-dependent friend-polycule of Asians writing about diaspora trauma. (Also a diet-cult thing, if you think about it.) And that was just her 20s. “I feel lucky that I didn’t start working in Hollywood until my frontal lobe was developed,” she says, laughing. Her 30s have been no less wild: After breaking out in the HBO series Hacks in 2021, the actress unexpectedly got pregnant — she took the test at an Applebee’s — and, deciding she was ready for motherhood, gave birth to her first child. Her personal mantra is “God Loves Sluts.”
