How Far a Performance Goes: Li Yitong in A Prophet and The Vanishing Beauty

Within an hour of the premiere of The Vanishing Beauty (美人余) on October 9, the two most-endorsed short comments on Douban (豆瓣), China's main film and book review site, both faulted its lead actress. Each gathered more than a thousand votes. By October 12 a comment that went on to draw hundreds of votes ran the other way: her acting, it said, had been underrated, and a character with complicated feelings kept below the surface suited her.

She was already on screen elsewhere. A Prophet (我不是大师), a 24-episode con drama set in the Republican era, premiered on September 24 on iQIYI and Tencent Video and wrapped in early October. There the conversation was mostly about the scams. Li Yitong (李一桐) leads both series, and they ask opposite things of her. Across several years of interviews she has described how she decides what a part needs.

The costume years

Li trained as a folk dancer at the Beijing Dance Academy and came to acting after helping a friend from film school with a short. Her first lead was in the fantasy web series Demon Girl (半妖倾城) in 2016. The part that made her known came in January 2017, when Dragon TV aired The Legend of the Condor Heroes (射雕英雄传) and she played Huang Rong (黄蓉), the quick-witted heroine of Jin Yong's (金庸) martial-arts novel. She won a newcomer award at Dragon TV's annual drama ceremony that year. The leads that followed were mostly period pieces: the assassin Wan Mei in Bloody Romance (媚者无疆) in 2018, and in 2019 Lu Wenxi (陆文昔) in the court drama Royal Nirvana (鹤唳华亭), a young woman who enters the crown prince's household to save her family.

Looking back in 2023, she did not treat those years as a phase to outgrow. In a February 3, 2023 interview with China News Service (中国新闻网), she was asked for the three roles that mattered most to her and named Huang Rong, Wan Mei and Lu Wenxi. The interviewer observed that a martial-arts heroine, a romance and a court-intrigue role have little to do with the part under discussion. Viewers had sorted her into the costume-drama beauty; her own list reads as three different women.

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A year of breaking things

The part under discussion was Meng Yu (孟钰) in The Knockout (狂飙), a crime drama that aired on CCTV-8 and iQIYI from January 2023 and closed on Douban at 8.8. Meng Yu is a journalist who grows up alongside the policeman at the centre of the story, and the role covers twenty-one years. Li came to it after several months without work at the end of 2022, which she spent learning a new style of dance and an instrument, reading and travelling with her family. Of that stretch she said: "If you're anxious at home every day, it's like riding a little wooden horse."

She had also changed her mind about being scored. She says she used to resist formats that rank performers by marks, and the months off changed that; an acting-competition programme she joined aired that year. Of the year as a whole she said: "If you don't break an old self, you can't build a new one."

On the role itself she described two habits. The first is research. She concluded that undercover reporters have to pass as street sellers, beggars or bar staff, whatever the story calls for. "The more you understand the character, the more accurately you catch her," she said.

The second is the degree. The young Meng Yu is impulsive, slapping thugs bare-handed, and in Li's phrase a textbook case of the newborn calf that fears no tiger; she says the amount of that energy had to be judged. In the later part of the story Meng Yu is over forty, and Li began to pull back and look for ease. On playing a woman across decades she said: "When you play twenty to forty, don't deliberately change things to seem old and steady." Experience, she added, is what brings a person to relaxation, and manner and judgement follow from it.

Her hardest scene was Meng Yu's reaction after a kidnapping, a trauma response the character cannot control. Li had never been kidnapped, she said, so she kept turning the reaction over until it would read as true to an audience. That spring she was named Breakthrough Actor of the Year at the 2022 Weibo Night (微博之夜) gala, on March 25.

Holding back: A Prophet

A Prophet pairs self-contained cons with a longer revenge storyline, and Li shares the lead with Li Xian (李现). She plays Jiang Feiyan (江飞燕), raised in a school of deception and trained in opera, music, calligraphy and painting alongside the trade itself. We cover the show in A Prophet: The Republican-Era Con Drama Where Every Trick Has a Trick Behind It.

The audience went mostly to the cons. The most popular review on Douban is an explainer on the real-world tricks behind them, and one Bilibili (哔哩哔哩) creator's eight-part breakdown of the series has passed fourteen million plays. The series stands at 7.3 on Douban from just over 40,000 ratings. Li appears in that conversation as a supporting subject. An early comment with more than six hundred votes called her a plot tool so far, and another reader pointed out that in the first seven episodes the female lead had less screen time than the women who feature in individual cons. One later review describes the character's sharp brow and upright bearing.

Jiang Feiyan's trade is showing other people what they want to see, so a performance that gives little away is part of the character's design. In this series the pulled-in half of the Meng Yu method is the whole assignment.

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Letting go: The Vanishing Beauty

The Vanishing Beauty is a 28-episode urban drama adapted from Yi Bei's (伊北) novel of the same name. It streams on Tencent Video from October 9 and has aired nightly on Dragon TV from October 10. Li plays Yu Meng (余梦), the only daughter of a well-off Jiangsu-Zhejiang-Shanghai family. Her marriage collapses after an anonymous photograph arrives on its fifth anniversary, and she moves from the wronged wife to the planner of the counter-move against her husband, Di Liren (狄立人), played by Qiao Zhenyu (乔振宇). The fight extends to the signing authority at her family's company. Our guide is The Vanishing Beauty: The Marriage Drama Where the Wife Plans the Divorce Like a Takeover.

Speaking on October 12 to Bazaar Film (芭莎电影), the film team of the magazine Fashion Bazaar (时尚芭莎), Li described Yu Meng as two performances in one. Of the first half she said: "In the early part, all the laughter, sadness and coquetry came from the heart." In the second half, she said, the character laughs, cries and acts coy against her own feelings, a turn from real to false that she called very dramatic.

In mid-October she also spoke to Tencent Video's interview series Ru Xi (入戏, "In Character"). Reading the script, she found Yu Meng's early suppression frustrating, but an opponent who is too weak makes for a dull story. Of the character's response she said: "Yielding unconditionally is absolutely not okay."

Reception is divided. In an October 14 critics' column, the Yangtze Evening Post (扬子晚报) called the plotting formulaic and its details unconvincing, while singling out the scene in which Yu Meng, having put on a hard front in public, breaks down in tears in her car. Douban has not yet opened a score for the series. Its reviewers argue over the same short-drama pacing, and over the wife and the mistress joining forces. Here the praise and the criticism are both addressed to the lead, where A Prophet sends the discussion elsewhere.

What carries over

Her answers in 2023 and 2026 share a thread about age. In 2023 she warned against playing older than your years on purpose. In October she told Bazaar Film: "Don't be bound by society's definition of age." Each age, she added, has its own character: thirty has the depth of what has settled, twenty the energy of youth.

On liuliang (流量, "traffic", the industry's word for an actor's pull on fan attention), she told a video interview circulated by Shanhai Video (山海视频) on February 12, 2026 that she once thought acting skill and audience reach had nothing to do with each other, and now thinks it better to have both. She now takes genres she would once have avoided, partly because she has not tried them and partly because of what she wants for herself.

One month put the two ends of that to work: a series that asks the performance to stay inside the character, and one that asks it to show. Both rest on the skill she described in 2023, deciding how far a performance goes and when it comes back. The viewers who first knew her as Huang Rong now argue about her acting on the review page of a drama about a divorce, which is a different kind of attention from the one she began with.