With his role as Shang-Chi in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Simu Liu knows what it's like to play a bona fide hero. He's at the other end of the spectrum with his much more horrifying role as Harlan in the new Netflix movie Atlas.

Directed by Brad Peyton, Atlas is a sci-fi action movie that imagines a conflict between humans and AI sometime in the future. Liu is featured as the main villain in his role as Atlas, the world's first AI-powered terrorist. Peyton was joined by Liu to address the character in an interview with CBR's Katie Doll to promote Atlas, and the Barbie actor shared how it felt liberating to play a villainous role, given how many rules are given when playing the hero.

"I think being a villain is very freeing," Liu said. "Playing a straight lead character, like a straight man, comes with a lot of rules. It's a lot of, 'You can't do this,' or 'You can't do that,' or 'You can't appear [as] too much of this.' You're juggling the thread of the story, and you've got to carry so much. I feel like a villain has so much more of a blank canvas in front of them. What do you want to do? How do you envision your character?"

"Playing a straight lead character, like a straight man, comes with a lot of rules."

Liu further explained, "Harlan, in particular, is one that you kind of build from the ground up because he's not human. There's very little an actor can do. It's not drawing on human experiences. It's building the artifice of what this artificial intelligence is meant to be, represent or make someone feel."

"Working with Brad was really great [for] crafting both the look, feel and voice of what Harlan was," the actor concluded. "We settled on this kind of chillingly-friendly [persona]. In a way, almost like he's very gentle. I think back to how Harlan was made [and] what he was made to do. He's always made to be a friend to humanity, to serve humanity and to make humanity better. Even though he can say the most evil things like, 'I want to cleanse the Earth and [rain] nuclear fire that's going to purge the world of the vast majority of humanity,' he does so, but on a matter of fact that he's still so bound by his programming."

The synopsis for Atlas reads, "Atlas Shepherd (Jennifer Lopez), a brilliant but misanthropic data analyst with a deep distrust of artificial intelligence, joins a mission to capture a renegade robot with whom she shares a mysterious past. But when plans go awry, her only hope of saving the future of humanity from AI is to trust it."

Atlas is now streaming on Netflix.

#simuliu #jenniferlopez #atlas

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