When the chance to play Alina Starkov, the highly effective hero of the wildly well-liked Netflix sequence Shadow and Bone, got here throughout the actress Jessie Mei Li’s desk, she was floored by the prescience of its arrival. It was 2019, and Li had simply began out—the U.Okay. native participated in just a few stage performs and was happening auditions often. However the Shadow and Bone script, which was tailored from the YA fantasy novel of the identical identify by Leigh Bardugo, stood out from the remaining.

“I’d grown up loving fantasy—I watched Lord the Rings continuously—and I used to be like, grasp on a minute,” Li tells me from the sofa in her London flat, which she shares with roommates and some cats. “They particularly need somebody who appears like me. That’s cool. I by no means thought that may be a factor.” However her position as Starkov—and the present Shadow and Bone itself—has grown into excess of only a factor. When season one launched in 2021, the present obtained huge consideration from followers of the books who fell in love with Li and her costars’ magnetic power and twisty, fantastical storyline. Season two dropped on March 16—and is at present primary on Netflix’s high 10 listing, (dethroning You). And a central level of attraction behind season two’s storyline is Alina’s expanded narrative arc: Basic Kirigan (Ben Barnes), aka The Darkling, has despatched his military of indestructible shadow monsters after her, and Alina should wrangle her personal energy to avoid wasting her family members—and herself.

To say that being solid within the sequence modified her life seems like an understatement. “I keep in mind different buddies who needed to be actors saying, ‘You’re in all probability gonna discover it tough. You’re by no means gonna be in a interval drama’—I simply thought that was actuality, as a result of I’m not full white,” Li, who’s of Hong Kong Chinese language and English descent, recollects. “A good friend of mine who’s white mentioned, ‘You may by no means play Elizabeth Bennett.’ And it broke my coronary heart as a result of I used to be like, ‘Ah, yeah, you’re proper. They would not solid me. It could be complicated. I used to be so caught in that mindset. So I used to be shocked about how oddly particular Shadow and Bone was when it comes to the form of factor I needed to do on the time.”

Li, who additionally stars within the upcoming British-American action-thriller Havoc alongside Tom Hardy, filmed season two of Shadow and Bone throughout a pivotal time in her life. Season one got here simply because the actress had dropped out of faculty (“I had been denying myself enjoyable as a result of I had the sensation I needed to plod on, go to uni, get a wise job, all of that”) and enlisted in appearing lessons on the Nationwide Youth Theater earlier than nabbing an agent. Nevertheless, “2022 was probably the most intense years of my life,” Li recollects. “However it’s been a giant 12 months of development and self-awareness, and that’s fucking cool.” For the primary half of final 12 months, the actress jetted off to Budapest to movie, plunging herself again into the world of Alina, the Solar Summoner and probably the most highly effective Grisha to ever reside. “I had such a transparent concept of how Alina can be,” Li says. “She’s a personality whose energy is about bringing gentle, however she is making an attempt to cover. And that was the principle idea: she has a lot interior power, energy, and heat however had hidden it away. I’ve at all times been informed I’m fairly a pleasant type of individual. I believed that may be fairly a pleasant high quality to lend to Alina as effectively. When you’re speaking about wanting her to be a benevolent chief and have individuals comply with her, she wanted to have that interior daylight.

“I used to be actually excited in regards to the concept of getting a protagonist that plenty of individuals, not simply East Asian younger ladies, might relate to,” Li continues. “It was vital to have this character who felt like an actual individual, who didn’t look good on a regular basis and was weak. She was, to be trustworthy, a bit pathetic in the beginning.”

The concept of getting again into work with “the Shadow and Bone gang” as Li calls them, introduced her a burst of power that carried all through filming. However the actress stresses this is part of her persona she’s nonetheless studying to handle. “I simply suppose I can do all the things and I am going into hyper mode, the place I could be fully sleep disadvantaged, however I’ll push and push and push. And on high of that, I completely love my job a lot and I actually give it my all,” she says. “I endure from continual insomnia, so I wasn’t sleeping, I misplaced weight, and I wasn’t in a position to articulate what I wanted. I’ve traditionally been a type of individuals who simply thinks, yeah, I can do this. I’ll get on with it. However filming this season taught me to take it straightforward, say no generally, and draw boundaries. That made it an incredible expertise, on high of all the things we’ve executed.”

One other essential second that occurred inside the previous three years was Li’s ADHD analysis. Immediately, Li’s thoughts’s tendency to wander and her difficulties planning for the long run got here into focus and made sense.

“When you’re neurodivergent and undiagnosed, you spend most of your time considering, what on earth is occurring?” she says. “I simply really feel like I’ve acquired a few hundred completely different personalities and I can barely maintain observe of what’s happening, half the time; I’m fairly chaotic as a human being. However truly, I’ve grown to like myself much more because the ADHD analysis. There are many issues which can be sensible about ADHD, and I feel it makes me a greater actress.

“Nonetheless, I’m form of an odd fish!” she says, laughing laborious.