Recipe for survival

In online series Her, singer-actress Leah Dou debuts as a boxer who refuses to give up on life and makes a remarkable comeback as a chef, Xu Fan reports.

At just 13 years old, she is taken by her single mother to a sports school, where she lives and trains alone as a boxer until she is 25. To make pocket money, she sometimes collects discarded plastic bottles or runs small errands for classmates.

She deeply misses her mother. Her emotions are shaken by a shocking letter announcing her mother's death — along with a notice about a massive inheritance overseas.

However, it turns out to be a scam orchestrated by her younger stepbrother — the son of her mother's second husband — who wants to shift their mother's enormous gambling debt onto her.

This twist-filled plotline unfolds in Her, the online drama series in which singer-actress Leah Dou makes her debut.

Dou, who inherited her musical talent from her parents, formed a band at 14 and released her first original song a year later. With early recognition in both music and acting, she quickly rose to fame, winning multiple awards — including the Tiantan Award for Best Supporting Actress at the 9th Beijing International Film Festival for her silver screen debut The Eleventh Chapter.

In Her, Dou plays Liu Yan — a character whose life is vastly different from her own. Dubbed by some netizens as one of the most "ill-fated female leads" in recent years, Liu is forced into an underground black-market boxing ring to pay off her mother's debt. Though she manages to clear it, her body is left covered in wounds. Her next challenge: finding a way to support herself and her younger brother.

Thanks to the cooking skills Liu learned as a teenager from her mother — once a chef at a state-run restaurant — she lands a job at a high-end restaurant. Starting as a dishwasher, she works her way up, eventually teaching herself to cook and offering a sliver of hope in her struggle to survive in a foreign land.

The 24-episode series — costarring Wang Chuanjun and Yan Bingyan — began streaming on iQiyi and Tencent Video on July 21.

Dou, described by director and close friend Li Mengqiao as a "foodie" before joining the project, trained in boxing and cooking for over seven months in preparation for the role. Filming took place in Beijing and Macao between June and October 2023.

When asked what drew her from music to acting, Dou said she's always admired the art of performance.

"I have memories of watching films with my family at home and taking drama classes in school. I've always enjoyed the idea of being able to play someone else. You know, there's a sense of liberation. Because in real life, I think we're all playing multiple roles whether, you know, it's mother or daughter or just a person with a name," she says.