‘Red Carpet’ Book Excerpt: How Fan Bingbing Went From China’s Most Famous Actress To Its Most Famous Cautionary Tale
deadline.comEditor’s Note: Wall Street Journal reporter Erich Schwartzel’s new book Red Carpet: Hollywood, China and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy includes a chapter on Fan Bingbing, one of China’s biggest global stars who disappeared from public view in 2018 shortly after she was cast to star in the female action spy movie The 355.
In the excerpt below from the Penguin Press book, Schwartzel takes readers from Cannes through Fan’s house arrest — where she was “watched constantly, even while taking showers” — to her eventual reappearance (albeit via greenscreen and with a body double for The 355) as she had become what Schwartzel calls “the most famous chicken used by Chinese authorities to scare the monkeys of its entertainment industry.”*** Here’s the excerpt:The paparazzi could barely contain themselves as they took in the quintet of stars.
China’s most famous actress, Fan Bingbing, joined Jessica Chastain, Penélope Cruz, Lupita Nyong’o, and Marion Cotillard on the red carpet of the Cannes Film Festival in May 2018.
Fan and her fellow actresses had just been cast in The 355, a forthcoming film about a cadre of female spies, its title inspired by the code name given to a woman who spied for George Washington in the Revolutionary War.
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