Living Abroad: One Actor’s Journey in Beijing
So it was that even before moving to the capital, Matt Cool made his first mark as a professional entertainer in China. He was hired as an actor to film eight episodes as a contestant on a Chinese reality TV show while still living in Zhengzhou. Naturally, he came away with some unique, and often hilarious, memories.
“There was a muscle competition where we were taught poses and had to wear wrestling fatigues,” he whimsically begins as he thinks back to other events. “There was laser tag, and a hockey competition, and the bulk of the show was filmed in a mansion near the Yellow River. The results were all pretty much fixed…except the hockey, I really did win that. I was the only one that knew how to skate.”
Despite this early Henan-based foray into the Chinese entertainment industry, it wasn’t until Cool moved to Beijing that his acting career really got going. Thankfully, it has never completely lost the sense of anything-goes absurdity that characterized his debut.
“I’ve done television, film, voiceovers and commercials. I even did a marketing campaign where I was flown to Chengdu to play Elvis in a promotion for a luxury brand,” he says.
Tempting though it is to further discuss the Elvis gig, we instead move on to Cool’s current projects. As it turns out, it’s proving to be far more interesting than playing The King.
“Working as a foreign b-actor in China hasn’t always been the most glamorous career move,” he starts, presumably to establish that it’s not all hockey dominance and dead rock stars. The story that he follows with leaves me no doubt that he speaks the truth.
“Yesterday morning I was playing an American soldier shot down by Japanese troops for a historical drama. They had me on a frozen pond chipping away at the ice for a scene where I was supposed to be looking for water. When the ice started cracking in many places all over the pond, the production crew and I started to make for land. The director came out screaming at us ‘mei shi ba (“it’s nothing”) – that’s just how the ice is, keep going until we get the shot!’”
Cool sounds relieved when he adds in that, “I’m just happy we got it done early in the morning before the sun was in full force.”
Evidently his trials with the director did not end there.
“Later on, I was being dropped from a tree for a parachute scene and the director publicly berated me for not flailing my arms and legs wildly enough. ‘Are you stupid?’ he screamed at me, ‘this sha bi (a harsh Chinese curse referring to female genitalia) doesn’t understand anything!’ I made about $120 U.S dollars that morning…”
He intentionally trails off, but it’s more out of amusement then any genuine resent; in fact, when I begin to sound too critical of the tyrannical director, Cool steps up to his defense, explaining to me that his tormentor has probably had a rough go of life in the Chinese film industry and is likely just frustrated by a lack of career advancement throughout that life. The director still sounds pretty miserable to me, but I’ve also always known Cool to have an almost unreasonably high tolerance for difficult personalities, and it’s nice to see that this much has not changed.
Unlike many, China has not jaded or embittered him, and this is a large ingredient in his success and continued happiness here. Rather than expecting everything to suddenly make sense after a few years, he confesses that he prefers that everything around him remain strange and mysterious.
“I guess my favorite thing is that everything is still so alien. I’ve always jokingly told people I’ll leave when I feel I have a mastery of the language and understanding of the culture. If that’s the case, I’m stuck here for good,” he says.
It’s a sentence that doesn’t seem to upset him any too much, at least for the moment. He’s living a versatile life in a country that fascinates him, and with the upgrade from Zhengzhou to Beijing, he’s in no way hurting for “creature comforts.”
And after all, as his answer to my final question just goes to show, some things are the same wherever you go. Asked if the Chinese ever take notice of his unique last name, he smiles as if he’d been waiting for it the whole time, and says, “Reaction to my name seems to be the one thing universal with strangers anywhere in the world. They usually just smile and say ‘Really? Cool!’”
