In the originalShadow and Bonetrilogy, Alina was imagined as a fair-skinned woman.
“It is a myth to think that borders are walls.
Borders are porous,” she continues.
Jessie Mei Li as Alina in Netflix’s ‘Shadow and Bone.'.Netflix
“People fall in love across them.
They do business across them.”
“The question at the heart of Alina is, Where do I belong?”
Ben Barnes and Jessie Mei Li in ‘Shadow and Bone.'.NETFLIX
Li also credits Strain for being the “go-to person when talking about Alina.”
Li, too, came with her own interpretation of the character.
“In the books, she’s an outsider.
She doesn’t really believe that she’s important, and she has this drive to prove herself.
And she’s quite patriotic,” the 25-year-old explains.
Bardugo agrees this character shift would “shed a different kind of light on the story.”
Li secured multiple auditions that week for various projects, butShadow and Bonejumped out.
“I love fantasy,” she says.
“I grew up being Gandalf [fromThe Lord of the Rings] with my brother.
We’d be doing sword fights in the park with sticks.
I’m very much of that generation.
I was always Gandalf.
I could do the voice and everything.
My brother was always Legolas, and I wasn’tallowedto be Legolas.”
She playfully scoffs at the thought.
“We all had our characters, me and my cousins and my friends.
Li, who is half Chinese, later left the audition with a newfound need to land the part.
Then, as fate would have it, everything came together rather quickly.
The producers searched far and wide for an actress to play Alina through an open casting call.
As is typical of tapes, Li finished by reading out her contact information.
“We thought, ‘Well, there’s the Sun Summoner!’
A person who really felt she was made of light.”
Fortunately, she was of the same mind.
We have a pick, but we don’t want to bias you.
So, we’re not going to tell you who it is,'” Bardugo remembers.
“I open up my laptop and I start watching.
I get to the third reading and it’s Jessie.
I shut my laptop and I picked up the phone.
I said, ‘If it’s not Jessie, I’m not interested.
So, it’d better be her.’
Luckily, it was because that would have been an incredibly awkward conversation after that.”
Former President Donald Trump routinely referred to it as “the China virus” or “Wuhan flu.”
The themes addressed inShadow and Bonenow feel even more resonant to Li.
“It definitely affected me in lots of ways.
“Then to my non Asian friends, I would besoAsian.
And then to my Asian friends, I was the everyone has to translate for.”
“I really wish we didn’t have this question.
I really wish we didn’t have this spike in anti-Asian sentiment and violence,” Heisserer reflects.
“It’s heartbreaking and gut-wrenching.
That felt both precipitous and ominous at the same time.
People tend to consume with their trauma and their hurt front and center.
