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James Mottram

Patience is a virtue, they say. Although Peter Chan Ho-sun’s film She’s Got No Name recently debuted in cinemas, it has been nine years since the veteran Hong Kong director first approached Zhang Ziyi to star in it.
“She said ‘yes’ almost on the spot,” he says. “With no script, with nothing.”
The Chinese actress, who is known for her roles in award-winning films such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Memoirs of a Geisha, has been scaling back her work of late and spending more time with her family. But this role was different.
“I’ve always had the passion for movies, but I didn’t really see any perfect script until Peter approached me with this,” Zhang says.


With the film based on a famous unsolved murder case in 1945 Shanghai, Zhang’s role is unlike any other.
She plays a downtrodden, illiterate working-class woman known only as Zhan-Zhou. The story begins with her being arrested for killing her abusive husband and dismembering his body.
Chan says that at the time, the murder was front-page news in “cosmopolitan” and “progressive” Shanghai, a city that embraced both Chinese and Western values.
“It was a very famous story. And now, obviously, because of the movie, people dig up that story … it’s all over the place again.”
No doubt, it struck a chord with Zhang.
“I just could not forget about this story and this role,” the 46-year-old says. “I think it’s a [once in a] lifetime opportunity to meet a character like this.”

But after offering Zhang the lead role in She’s Got No Name, Chan “stalled” and “changed plans”, instead making two other features: tennis bio Li Na: My Life (2018) – which remains unreleased – and Leap (2020), the story of the Chinese women’s volleyball team that reached the Olympics in 2016.
The problem was, he did not tell Zhang – who began shedding weight to play her character in the crime drama.
Zhang recalls one day they met at a cinema event in Beijing.
“We all sat at the same table, and then he said, ‘Oh, why do you look so skinny?’ I said, ‘I tried to prepare for the role,’ and then he said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry to tell you I’m not going to make it.’ I wanted to kill him!” she says with a chuckle.
Chan came back to Zhang when he was finally ready to make the film, much to her relief.
“For me,” she says, “I think it’s karmic destiny.”

Zhang used her altered appearance in She’s Got No Name to take her fans by surprise. “I don’t want the audience to easily recognise me,” she says.
Chan feels the same way. “It’s very important to have the audience seize the character and not Zhang Ziyi. So for her to be different is one of the first concerns that we wanted to have. The blessing of working with her, with Zhang Ziyi, is that she brings so much to the character.”
Zhang’s performances are typically physically dexterous, robust and resilient. “She’s always been good at playing strong characters, but we want her [initially] to be vulnerable, weak,” Chan says.
“And she brought a lot to not just the movie, but to the script, to the dialogue, to the way she responded with the other actors, stuff that I never even thought of,” he adds.

Zhang often improvised on set, putting her own stamp on the character.
“I kept saying this is the longest shoot in my entire career,” says Chan, whose career stretches back to the early 1990s. “We almost had a hundred-day shoot. And in a film that has no action.”
There were extensive rehearsals for the film, which co-stars Lei Jiayin as the deputy police commissioner who makes the initial arrest and Wang Chuanjun as the husband.
“We took a lot of time working with actors,” Chan says, calling it “one of the most satisfying experiences” of his directorial career.

She’s Got No Name sees Zhan-Zhou’s story span over years, which was another appealing aspect for Zhang.
“I have never played any role like this, crossing a long period of time,” she says.
“From the beginning, she’s very weak and she has nowhere to run,” Zhang adds. “She has to sacrifice what she had, the love relationship, the marriage. And slowly, she’s getting stronger and stronger. In the beginning, when she’s kept in jail, she wanted to die. She’s waiting to. She knows, ‘I killed somebody.’”
Over time, things shift for Zhan-Zhou as she retracts her statement, and others come to her aid.
The film originally screened out of competition at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival as a 150-minute epic, although Chan has since decided to split the story in two, believing the two-and-a-half-hour cut was too long for a commercial release.
Opening the Shanghai International Film Festival in June, the moody-looking, noirish first part depicts Zhan-Zhou’s time in jail and subsequent trial.

Despite this finessing, it does not change what first drew Chan to the story of a woman’s strength and resolve at a time when so many restrictions were placed on Chinese women.
“It just fits into the motif of almost every single one of my films,” Chan says.
The director notes that with the exception of period drama The Warlords (2007) and American Dreams in China (a 2013 film about three friends setting up an English-language school in China), he has always been drawn to depicting female leads “that are very resilient”.
While Chan calls feminism “a hot-button topic in China right now”, he is reluctant to reduce the film to simply being a feminist call-to-arms.
“Because I tell the story from the perspective of a human being, it’s not really relevant to look at the film from the angle of dogmatism or feminism. So it’s really about the human condition, on both sides, of both men and women of the times.”

The way he sees it, domestic violence, sadly, “probably will always happen” – abuse that can be verbal as well as physical.
Chan’s film sets Zhang on a new path, and it will be intriguing to see what the actress does next.
Her last Hollywood role was in 2019’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters, and she says there is little chance of her taking on the sort of martial arts roles that dominated her earlier career.
“As I’m getting older, I don’t want to do any physical stuff, because I had a lot of pain in my body,” she says.
In any case, after the fabulous results of She’s Got No Name, she has seen what can happen if you just take a step back.
“I wait,” she smiles. “Patience!”
Want more articles like this? Follow SCMP Film on Facebook


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Zhang Ziyi (centre) and Peter Chan (bottom right) at the 27th Shanghai International Film Festival on June 14, 2025. Photo: AFP

Zhang Ziyi in a still from She’s Got No Name.

Lei Jiayin in a still from She’s Got No Name.

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Wang Chuanjun in a still from She’s Got No Name.

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Zhang talks about leading Peter Chan’s crime drama about an abused wife in 1940s Shanghai and why she ‘wanted to kill’ the director


Zhang talks about leading Peter Chan’s crime drama about an abused wife in 1940s Shanghai and why she ‘wanted to kill’ the director.


Why Zhang Ziyi waited years to play a husband killer in She’s Got No Name

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Zhang talks about leading Peter Chan’s crime drama about an abused wife in 1940s Shanghai and why she ‘wanted to kill’ the director

Zhang talks about leading Peter Chan’s crime drama about an abused wife in 1940s Shanghai and why she ‘wanted to kill’ the director