Presence star Callina Liang’s dad was skeptical of her dream to become an actor — until a high school test gave her some data-driven validation.
“My family is pretty small. I don’t have any siblings, and it’s just me and my dad, literally. I have no cousins, nothing,” she tells MovieMaker.
She was attending school in Singapore, on track for a career in medicine, when she fell in love with acting and shocked her dad by earning a “Top of the World” ranking in the drama category of the Cambridge International General Certificate of Secondary Education exam (IGCSE) in 2016.
“Funnily enough, that was probably the one thing that tipped my dad over, because he wasn’t taking it seriously until he was like, ‘Oh, you scored Top of the World? Oh, okay, maybe you’re actually okay at this,’” she says.
“He was like, ‘Listen, I’ll give you a few years to try it out, because you’ve got to start young with acting, but you can go into med school whenever,’” she recalls. “Now he’s obviously very supportive.”
Liang’s first feature film role was, appropriately enough, about exams. In J.C. Lee’s Bad Genius, which came out in October, she played Lynn, a smart student who creates an underground cheating operation to help her friends get good test scores.
Now she’s poised for a breakout in Presence, a psychological horror thriller directed by Steven Soderbergh and written by David Koepp about a family that moves into a suburban home and realizes they’re not alone.
The film, which also stars Lucy Liu, Chris Sullivan and Julia Fox, was so intense that some audience members walked out during its Sundance premiere last year. Liang was absorbed by seeing the film for the first time, and didn’t notice anyone leave.
“You go in thinking it’s this horror thriller — but no, it kind of hits psychologically,” she says. “David Koepp did an amazing job. I don’t think anything like it has ever been done before. I don’t want to give away too much, but it’s very uncomfortable to watch. The entire time, you kind of feel like this fly on the wall, like you’re not supposed to be seeing this or hearing this. It’s quite sad, too. You really see this family come together and fall apart. It’s very raw.”
Callina Liang on Prepping for Action
Liang’s character in Presence, like Liang, has a very close relationship with her dad.
“She’s just this very troubled young girl. She’s 16, she’s going through a lot, but I feel like I could relate to her in the sense that she was very isolated in the family,” she says. “I definitely saw a lot of myself in her. It was very fun playing her, because it was almost like tapping into my inner child, and almost healed that a little bit for me.”
Also Read: The Oh, Hi! Team on Their Confident Race to Finish the Film for Sundance
Liang, who now lives in Toronto, was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, but moved to China with her father as a young child, later spending time in Australia, Singapore, New York, and London, where she got her first professional role on ITV’s Tell Me Everything.
The show provided her with her first taste of action. She has trained for years in martial arts – Wushu and Silat — and hopes to do her own stunts. In Tell Me Everything, she got to jump out of a building and onto a crash mat.
“Even when we weren’t filming, I was like, ‘Can I just try it again?’ And people had to be like, ‘Just stop falling out of this thing, man. Like, you’re going to get a headache,’” she laughs.
Liang stresses that she’s not a daredevil in real life — just on set: “If you ask me to go skydiving or bungee jumping, I’d probably say no.”
Presence in now in theaters, from NEON.
Main image: Callina Liang. Photo by Pip.