2 actors fill different goals as tragic ‘Rosemead’ finds an audience

Lucy Liu knew the instant she watched Lawrence Shou’s open-call audition video that the neophyte East Bay actor would be the perfect choice to portray her troubled cinematic son in the wrenching “Rosemead,” inspired by a real-life Southern California tragedy.

The 23-year-old Shou, a lifelong Fremont resident, won out over hundreds of others eager to play 17-year-old Joe, a troubled San Gabriel Valley area high school student with schizophrenia whose distraught mom Irene (Liu, in a transformative performance) is dying of cancer. Irene feels so trapped that she takes drastic measures as Joe’s 18th birthday approaches and he starts to spiral.

“I honed in immediately and I was like this kid is it,” said Liu. She recalled the audition tape during a November interview along with Shou in San Francisco prior to a SFFILM-sponsored screening of “Rosemead.

“This is his first feature film and it’s a very significant performance by a very new person who did not even know where to look for the lens. It’s really a phenomenal performance by Lawrence,” said Liu, a producer on the film who had been relentlessly trying to get “Rosemead” made for seven years.

It arrives Friday in Bay Area theaters with Shou slated to attend two post-screening conversations at the Metreon in San Francisco, following the 7 p.m. Friday and Saturday showings.

For the Hollywood newcomer, who started pursuing acting as a career only a few years before landing the role, it’s a dream come true. His previous experience had been limited to student films he made while at Chapman University in Orange. Now he’s co-starring with Liu, star of “Kill Bill: Vol. 1” and “Charlie’s Angels” among other films.

Here’s how it all went down.

“I was back home and I had been auditioning for some projects and I saw this open call online,” he said. “It was on a public actors casting website. I thought ‘Hey I’ve been auditioning for a lot of stuff, why not give it a shot?’’

Little did he know that producers already knew about him since a casting director from a student film he appeared in had recommended him.

“I submitted my name,” he recalls. “Forgot about it. Then they gave me an audition. I filmed it in my mom’s garage in Fremont. Sent it in again. Forgot about it. But then they saw something in me and they called me back. And the rest is history.”

Inspired by actual events detailed in a 2017 Los Angeles Times article by Frank Shyong on the circumstances that led to the deaths of real-life single mother and son, Lai and George Hang in Rosemead, director Eric Lin’s feature confronts the dangerous stigma attached to mental health and its treatment from within the Asian community and how blame, shame and language barriers can make matters even more untenable.

“We wanted to spark conversation,” Liu said. “We also know for a fact that it is resonating universally with everybody who is from another culture, (including) Italian and African American communities. They even said we were always taught and continue to be taught to keep it in the house, don’t show your dirty laundry, don’t expose what’s going on inside the house. So everyone opens the door and everyone’s ‘Leave It to Beaver,’ but you know when you close the door, it’s a disaster, and it’s like you could never really process and heal.”

Shou had heard about that true-life case prior to signing on for the film, which benefitted from 16 investors from within the community to help make it become a hard-fought reality.

Shou, who attended Fremont Christian School and worked at an AMC theater in town, was in middle school at the time when he heard about the Southern California case.

“I had a friend from church who actually went to the high school where it happened and I remember him telling this story.”

During the audition process he pieced together what he heard and realized that the film was inspired by the infamous incident. He  started reading more about it.“ I learned so much about this person and this family and the trauma and the love and the pain that they went through,” he said.

Shou wanted to ensure that “Joe” wasn’t presented as a stereotype but more of a complete person, not someone defined solely by schizophrenia.

“It wasn’t about, ‘Oh I’m playing this character with schizophrenia and let me go into my actor’s mindset and just go crazy,” he said. “No. I was focusing on what schizophrenia was, what it looks like, what it feels like and what it means to people who do have schizophrenia.”

Along with “Rosemead” director Eric Lin, the two “spent a lot of time doing research because we really wanted to play this character in a way to honor people who struggle with schizophrenia and to honor his memory as well.”

To take on the physicality of her overly burdened character Irene, Liu observed people on public transportation and also drew from her relatives and family “who have gone through a lot of medical suffering.”

“I really thought it was an integral part of how she held herself physically, but her internal will was so much stronger, like the scaffolding of her body was being held up by her courage. And there was something there that I wanted to tap into. I found most of her physicality through her language and the way she spoke Chinese (Liu’s parents are Chinese immigrants) and the way she spoke English.”

She sought to express the challenges of Irene thinking about something fluidly in her mind and then having to say it in English and how what comes out doesn’t cover the spectrum of what she intended.

“So the fragmentation of the language really helped to make her compassionate for the audience so that they could receive her in a way that I guess marginalized communities are received or immigrant families are received. I mean I come from an immigrant and I know what it is to watch the micro and the macro aggressions of your family when they are in a community where they judge you based on how you speak or what you eat or the way that you live.”

For Shou, “Rosemead” will likely open doors and perhaps require him to leave Fremont — the birth place of filmmaker Sean (“Didi”)  Wang — and relocate to L.A. It would be big shift for someone who didn’t exactly feel like he fit in with the theater kids while taking classes at an East Bay children’s theater, and who initially began college thinking he’d be pre-med. A year into college, the outlook had changed.

“I was like ‘Oh, my God I’m gonna do this for the rest of my life.”