Simu Liu

Simu Liu (born 1989) went from stock-photo model and background extra to the lead of Marvel’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021), by way of the sitcom Kim’s Convenience and a scene-stealing turn in Barbie. His AI stance is inseparable from that origin story: the bottom rungs of the ladder he climbed are the ones AI would automate first.

Defending the background

In October 2025, responding to investor Kevin O’Leary’s suggestion that AI could replace extras, Liu told Deadline the premise was false on the economics — “the idea that these background actors who are making minimum wage are somehow the reason why movies are now costing too much, that’s simply not true” — and destructive on the craft. Background work is where he learned how sets operate; strip it out, he argued, and you strip out the profession’s on-ramp.

That same season, Liu joined the pile-on against Tilly Norwood, the AI-generated “actress” launched by Eline Van der Velden’s studio Xicoia, posting a sarcastic Instagram jab: movies would surely be better if characters “weren’t played by actual humans, but by AI replicas approximating human emotion.” He also expressed faith in audiences to spot the fake: “when we see somebody in the background not moving like a human, we know.”

Liu, notably, is no reflexive technophobe — he is an investor and sits as a “dragon” on Canada’s Dragons’ Den. His objection is targeted: of all AI’s possible uses, he says, “replacing art is just, I feel like, the last thing that anybody wants to do with AI.”