Lucy Liu has just finished shooting her first episode of TNT’s “Southland”
Lucy Liu has just finished shooting her first episode of TNT’s “Southland” — and has found the show testing her mettle.
“You definitely get the grittiness, the reality of it,” she says of playing a cop in the January-debuting fourth season of the police drama. “You just jump in headfirst. I’ve done a couple of stunts, and, you know, it’s not about padding you up. It’s about throwing you around.
“I don’t think my martial-arts training is going to save me in this environment,” she adds with a laugh. “They can be running around using their guns.”
The “Charlie’s Angels” star recently went on a police ride-along with fellow “Southland” actor Michael Cudlitz to get to know her character’s territory. They cruised through some of the most crime-infested South Central Los Angeles neighborhoods.
“First of all, Michael Cudlitz and I drove together,” Liu says. “He was with me and the sergeants, and he let me sit in the front seat. I was like, ‘Thanks a lot.’ It was scary because you see children running around in these neighborhoods. There’s an unpredictable atmosphere, where you don’t know if something is going to happen. They tell you, ‘There was a shooting at that corner last week. There was a tree right there and it literally got blown away.’ And these kids live there.
“It gives you an immediate feeling of wanting to protect all these children and the other people in the neighborhood who aren’t involved in criminal activities, aren’t involved in gangs. You see all the dogs and cats running around on the streets that are obviously strays, and it’s easy to associate that with what’s going on in the neighborhoods themselves. And you just sense the fact that there’s less opportunity there than in Century City or Beverly Hills, and it’s just such a shame.”
Liu enjoys her character. She notes, “Viper’s back-story is that she was born without fangs, and her parents said, ‘Oh my gosh!’ But she made up for it with her kung fu.” (But not in South Central LA.)