zhongwans:

cr: yezi’s weibo•周也yeah

The Yezi and WOH appreciation post I was supposed to make two months ago but kept putting off~🍊

Most of you probably already know that Gong Jun and Zhang Zhehan weren’t the original actors for WOH, but I think not everyone knows that Zhou Ye was the only original cast member that insisted on staying despite the problems the production faced. The original Zhou Zishu and Wen Kexing supposedly left the production due to conflicts in their schedules (because of the pandemic) and Li Daikun was offered Wen Kexing’s role, but he declined saying that he didn’t feel like he could play him well and asked to play Xie'er instead.

Zhou Ye is a newbie actress, but is fairly known to be a talented one. Her performance as Wei Lai in the film Better Days was highly praised, and was in fact the reason WOH producer Ma Tao cited when she explained why she didn’t even require Zhou Ye to audition for the role of Gu Xiang. She saw her in Better Days and was immediately confident in her acting. But then filming was delayed because of the pandemic, the show lost a lot of funding and the main pair left the production. Four months to filming and there were still no actors for the main pair, only Zhou Ye was confirmed. WOH was very poorly favoured and a lot of people thought the production was beneath her. The few of us who were following the production at that time were nervous that at any time she’d have enough and drop the role, but thankfully she stayed!

Throughout filming, the production continued to be very poorly favoured because the final casting for WenZhou did not suit most people’s tastes, and the low investment and funding turned people off further. At one point, the production event trended on weibo because people thought the costumes were ugly. Fortunately, all their efforts paid off and WOH exploded in popularity a week or so after it came out. It was particularly satisfying to see people change their minds completely about WenZhou’s chemistry, and how the fans adored Zhou Ye’s portrayal of Gu Xiang. She has to be the most well-loved female lead in a dangai drama so far.

A lot of reviews pointed out that despite her age and relative inexperience, she seemed to have more dedication to her role than even some of her older peers. This is because one of the issues people bemoan about in recent years is how a lot of newer actresses have a bad habit of being too appearance conscious when playing their roles. There are certain actresses who are older than Zhou Ye, and have way more experience, that have been heavily criticized for their wooden acting because they’re too focused on staying pretty and fail to deliver realistic expressions. Zhou Ye was especially praised for “not caring about her image and beauty” when going all out with Gu Xiang’s explosive rage and grief in episode 35, living up to her character as one of the fiercest “ghosts”.

Zhou Ye said the reason she stayed with the production is because she loved the script and Gu Xiang’s character, and I think that says a lot about her attitude as well the kind of image she wishes to cultivate for herself. Instead of pursuing more flashy offers she stuck with WOH, no matter how unpopular it was, because she genuinely loved the script. In a way, it’s in line with the spirit of WOH’s production team as a whole. Ma Tao purposefully picked experienced but less popular actors that she believed suited the roles, rather than the idol-y type celebrities that most fans generally prefer, even if it meant losing the already meagre attention the production had in the first place. They deviated from what seems to be the “usual” practice in c-ent, which is relying on celebrities and idols with large fanbases to gain more views rather than on the quality of the drama itself. Yezi herself seems to be shying away from the usual cookie-cutter romance dramas and instead gravitating towards more serious and challenging roles like a young pregnant mother and a war torn orphan.

WOH was a production that didn’t “play by the rules” and just did its own thing, which seems to reflect on the cast themselves. On one hand you have Gong Jun and Zhang Zhehan giving zero shits and breaking nearly every CP “rule” in existence, and on the other there’s Zhou Ye dodging the usual female lead roles and flashy mainstream productions in favour of more unconventional projects.