Rough Edges: What Xiao Zhan Learned in Ten Years
On his 35th birthday and ten years after his debut, Xiao Zhan's own interview words trace a shift from sanding away every rough edge to wanting a few of them back.
Rough Edges
Xiao Zhan (肖战) turned 35 on 5 October 2026, in the tenth year since his debut. He marked the occasion with an EP, Yixiang Tiankai (异想天开, "flights of fancy"), released on 29 September and free on QQ Music, NetEase Cloud Music, KuGou and KuWo. NetEase confirmed the collaboration, and the title-track music video followed on his birthday.
An anniversary invites a victory lap. A more useful exercise is to read what Xiao has said himself, across magazine interviews and a few other sources, and notice what changed. Two of those sources frame the decade. In 2019, a Vogue China writer observed that he was putting great effort into "eliminating these rough edges", meaning the Chongqing (重庆) accent that slipped into his lines. In a 2026 Vogue China interview, Xiao said the opposite about acting: "I look forward to the unexpected emerging." He added that he wanted to "let some small rough edges grow."
Between those two statements sits a performer who trained to remove his imperfections, then learned to want a few of them back. What follows traces that shift through five threads: his past as a designer, the years 2020 and 2021, his work with lines and voice, the idea of "two Xiao Zhans", and Chongqing.
The designer's reflex
Xiao came to acting from graphic design, not from drama school. Renwu (人物, "People") magazine reported in 2020 that he once ran a small design studio, where he would offer a client three logo options and hope one was chosen. "I have to win the bid," he told the magazine, adding that everyone needs that kind of ambition. He said it was not about doing harm, but about refusing to lose.
He carried the vocabulary of the supplier's side with him. In Chinese contracts the client is Party A (jiafang, 甲方) and the contractor Party B (yifang, 乙方). Xiao describes celebrity in those terms. Even a company boss has a client of his own, he told Renwu, and "no one can be fully free to be themselves." He treats the job as a job. "Being a performer is just a job," he told Vogue Me for its February 2020 issue, and he joked that art students who resist office life have not faced society's "harsh interrogation", whereas he had, briefly. In 2019 he told Nandu Entertainment (南都娱乐) that an actor's basic discipline is simply doing the job properly.
The old career resurfaced on screen in Sunshine by My Side (骄阳伴我), where he plays a designer, Sheng Yang (盛阳). "When Sheng Yang had to draw plans, I really sat there and drew," he told Marie Claire China for its January 2024 issue. Asked in a 2023 interview, carried by People's Entertainment (人民文娱), what he hoped people would say about him, he answered with a smile: "His latest drama is good."
2020 and 2021: speaking through work
In late February 2020, some of his fans organised reports against a piece of fan fiction about him that had been posted on Weibo. From 29 February many mainland readers found the fan-fiction archive AO3 unreachable, and many blamed his fans. The link between the two has never been established. No authority has said it blocked the site, whose access from the mainland had long been unreliable, and his fans say what they reported was the Weibo post linking to the story, not AO3 itself. The episode unfolded in the first weeks of the Covid-19 outbreak, when Chinese social media was already full of grief and anger, and much of that anger settled on Xiao himself, who became the subject of a sustained public backlash.
What he said afterwards was mostly modest. In May 2020, in a video interview with Zhongxin Jingwei (中新经纬, an outlet under China News Service), he relayed a friend's advice for hard days: work when you are focused, read when you are muddled, think when you are alone, sleep when you are sad. A feature in the eighth issue of 2020 of Boke Tianxia (博客天下, "Blog World"), published in May, was titled "Learning to Live With Different Voices". In it he said he communicated with people "through my work", and that he had "nothing presentable yet". He quoted a line from his own song Guangdian (光点, "points of light"), released in April 2020 and recorded by Guinness World Records as China's fastest-selling digital single: the traces we leave become points of light. Asked how he built confidence, he described a gradual process: meet a difficulty, learn from it, repeat.
A longer conversation came from a video interview that Sina Entertainment filmed on 11 June 2020 at a charity event in Yu County (蔚县), and posted a week later. On giving, his emphasis was on duration: he wanted to keep going like "a thin stream", rather than rushing wherever help was needed that day. The interviewer then asked how he felt about being dropped by partners. By the subtitles, he said he understood, that this was a matter of mutual understanding, and that he must not cause trouble for others. He added that he had said before that he had not forgotten where he came from. Pressed on whether the moment hurt, he admitted it would be sad, but said he adjusted himself. Friends and seniors sent messages, he said, yet the core of it was in himself.
Later in the same interview he was asked what kind of character he wanted to play next. He said someone stronger and more powerful, then, addressing himself by name, joked that he had to live well, and added that he was "living quite well". Asked to sum up the previous summer in one word, he said "lucky", and wished for the coming one only that things go smoothly.
Work followed. Douluo Continent (斗罗大陆) aired in February 2021; when he dubbed it, he told Elle for its January 2022 issue, he found his own performance "very immature."
On 27 February 2021 he published a letter on Weibo called "Some Things I Want to Say". He wrote that he had "spent a long time digesting" what happened, then "a long time understanding" what people said and did. The letter also apologised for his silence the year before, shisheng (失声, "losing one's voice").
Two months later he played Patient No. 5 in the stage play A Dream Like a Dream (如梦之梦). Elle's account of that run centres on a line from the play that he cited: "It is all real." On stage, he said, everything happens once, in the moment, and no camera records it. He also cited a character's "seven eggs" theory: once you have chosen, you cannot go back and crack the fifth egg again. "Days can't be played again," he said, "so spend today well."
Lines, and the voice behind them
If there is a technical thread in his career, it is dialogue. In 2018 he told Jingpin Gouwu Zhinan (精品购物指南, "Boutique Shopping Guide") that lines were his biggest problem, because they can limit a performance, and that he was taking lessons: no shortcut, only hard work. In 2020 he told Harper's Bazaar China that a teacher once handed him a copy of the Xinhua Dictionary (新华字典, the standard Chinese dictionary) and told him: "Finish this dictionary and you've won." The teacher's aim, he explained, was to free him from the burden of delivery.
The stage was a harder test. A Dream Like a Dream runs about eight hours, and GQ China reported in 2024 that the actor who opens the play sets its pace. Xiao said the first performance left him extremely nervous. GQ's narration adds that when the lights hit, he could see only white. During one show, the magazine reports, he lost an ordinary word mid-monologue, paused for about a second and a half, and routed around it. He did not recall the word until the break.
GQ also noted that playing Xiao Chunsheng (肖春生), a dayuan zidi (大院子弟, "compound kid") in 1970s Beijing in The Youth Memories (梦中的那片海, 2023), meant speaking fluent Beijing dialect, a real challenge for a Chongqing native. Xiao told the magazine he had asked himself whether his southern roots were to blame for his trouble with lines: "Is it because I'm southern? I don't think so."
By 2025 he was known on set for one phrase. Renwu reported that directors independently recalled him saying "take it again", and Vogue China repeats it in 2026. On the film Dexian Jinzhi (得闲谨制; official English title unconfirmed), released in December 2025, he and his co-star reshot a quarrel scene about half a month later, at director Kong Sheng's (孔笙) suggestion. Kong did not say how to play it; he pointed out that a couple who had argued fifty or a hundred times would hardly be at full pitch. "I was playing a result," Xiao realised, and asked what the process had been. The scene stayed with him, Vogue reports.
That same article gives the 2026 version of the voice problem. He now looks at the monitor less, because actors on set do not see the picture, and the monitor shows a finished shape, like seeing the answer before solving a problem. What he wants is for the unplanned to arrive. The accent he once worked to remove is no longer the point; the unpredictable is.
Two Xiao Zhans
In 2019, Xiao told Jiuhao Modeng (九号摩登, "Number Nine Modern") that he was not a "warm guy", and certainly not an air conditioner for everyone, and that he disliked personas. "Why not just be a bit more real?" he asked.
The 2021 letter reached for a related idea. It spoke of the person he was before fame and the public figure he now had to be, and expressed the hope that these "two Xiao Zhans" would accept each other and blend.
In 2023, over a meal during filming at Fairy Mountain (仙女山) near Chongqing, he told Esquire there was another Xiao Zhan, "in quotation marks", who might no longer be him. "We all work for him, myself included."
In 2024, asked by GQ about going out, he said that on the street, "no one will actually notice you", and that he wanted to ride the metro and browse shops.
In the 2026 Vogue China interview he was reminded of the two-person remark and laughed. "I hadn't quite learned to be with myself then," he said, and he would not phrase it that way now. The Xiao Zhan on screen, the one on billboards and the one in daily life are all him: "no need to divide it so absolutely." He added that in two or three years he might feel differently again. Between 2019's "be a bit more real" and 2026's "no need to divide it", the question moved from how to present himself to how to live with himself.
Chongqing, and not looking back
Chongqing recurs in his interviews as an anchor. In a 2023 Esquire profile he described recurring dreams of the factory estate where he grew up, and a dark stairwell he used to sprint through on the way up to his family's fifth-floor flat. In 2025 he told Renwu why ordinary life matters: if he is a tree, a tree does not grow in mid-air. "Have you ever seen a tree grow in the air?" Real people and real life, he said, are his soil.
Vogue China in 2026 adds a small, concrete scene. On a visit home he found a new bridge that had gone up across the river. "A bridge just appeared out of nowhere!" he said. However long he is away, he feels reassured once he hears the dialect. He also revised an older statement. He told Renwu in 2025 that he was "in real, concrete life". Now he put it differently: "I've always been in concrete life."
Renwu's 2025 feature supplies the closing thread. In early summer 2019, he was filming in the mountains when a huge sky lantern, used by the crew for lighting, rose above the dark. He posted a photo with a six-character caption, which Renwu renders as "Don't look back, ever". Asked whether he had found the answer he was seeking five years earlier, he said he had stopped looking: "Life doesn't have that many whys."
In another Renwu piece that January, he spoke of his parents' counsel when work is hard: being happy matters more than anything; if it is not working, come home. Asked what he hoped for his 38-year-old self, he said only: "I hope he'll be very happy." Asked how five years had changed him, he said it felt as if he had "changed and not changed".
Ten years on
In the Vogue China interview he looks back to the beginning of his acting career, when the work seemed so hard that he doubted whether he should continue. Over time, he said, each day seemed to confirm that persisting was right, and some long stretches and short moments of strain might have been part of growing. As for what comes next, he hopes for more good works and roles that move people. "Really," he said, then paused and said it again: "Really."
Three more of his series have yet to reach viewers. Diebao Shang Bu Fengding (谍报上不封顶) is a spy drama from Daylight Entertainment (正午阳光), set in 1948 Nanjing, in which he plays Ren Shaobai (任少白). Small Town Remedy (小城良方) is a medical drama in which he plays a doctor who returns to his hometown; the Dalian newspaper Peninsula Morning Post (半岛晨报) reported on 8 October 2026 that the streaming service Viu will carry it in Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines. Shiri Zhongyan (十日终焉), a suspense-fantasy series that began shooting in Qingdao on 10 April 2026 and wrapped in late July, casts him as Qi Xia (齐夏).
In 2018, Jingpin Gouwu Zhinan quoted him saying the stage "may be where I start, but absolutely not where my career ends." A decade later, the line reads less as ambition than as method. He started as someone who tried to remove every rough edge. After ten years of working through lines, silence and Chongqing dreams, he says he wants room for the unplanned, and his most habitual request on set is the same: take it again.
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