mirin

Yeah, ZXC is not a guy with a big build but he was always ... healthy looking before Pei Su - I remember seeing he got down to something like 7% body fat when prepping to play Pei Su (and he later said he was in poor health / had to visit the hospital a bunch of times while filming probably because he lost too much too fast). FXB also looks like he lost a lot of weight for this. Both of them have been getting flack for their looks in this drama but I think they put a lot of heart and effort into shaping their roles and it shows.

Ahhh I just saw that they changed the setting so it's in some parallel / future reality and changed the title/character names. I hope the plot is still recognizable though.

I hope it arrives soon and that it’s not unrecognizable or chopped to bits goodness.

There's a trailer for this up on youtube now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6VQBS3nz6Q.

This was an enjoyable watch and I definitely recommend it to anyone who likes dramas dealing with the military. The treatment of PTSD was surprising and it humanized the characters. In fact, I fell for so many of the characters that I kind of felt empty when the drama was done - I really wanted there to be more episodes or a second season.

I also have to say that YY’s performance as Yan Po Yue was solid and it made me re-evaluate him as an actor. I adored him as YX in King’s Avatar but didn’t end up enjoying some of his later works as much so I put this drama off for a while. Now I regret not picking it up and finishing it sooner!

I'm leaving this here under a spoiler tag since it has not much to do with JNDZZ as a drama. If you think lowly of how Song Zuer’s dramas have done to date or she’s not capable of doing this drama without some traffic star along for the ride or imply that she’s a zyk, well, I do think you're doing her a disservice but at the end of the day, I don’t know her at all and have no idea how warranted such comments are in relation to her career. But as a Zhang Xincheng fan, you don’t have much accurate info about his background/dramas. He's very much a young actor that's still climbing his way up but while there have been some dramas he was in that didn’t do well or received bad reviews because they were flawed dramas, there’s also been dramas he was in that did pretty well or received a lot of praise because they were solid dramas for that genre/type/grade of drama.

With respect to two of the ZXC dramas mentioned in this thread:
1) Skate Into Love is a youth drama that aired on ZJTV as well as streamed on Youku. It’s not some megahit but it did better than average for a cdrama airing on these platforms. There's a bunch of lists out there that place Skate into Love in the top ten dramas ratings-wise (both CVB and Kuyun) that were aired by ZJTV from 2019 to Dec 2022. It’s also pegged as having one of the highest number of online streams for a Youku-only drama in 2020.
2) It's not correct to say that Bright Future didn't do well as a drama. It may not have garnered much attention overseas because it’s very much a pro-CCP propaganda piece that’s aimed at the domestic audience , and it may not have met your personal expectations for a Daylight drama but it had one of the highest ratings for a CCTV drama in 2022.

And I don’t know if your definition of a ‘big’ drama is just wildly different from the usual one but for anyone familiar with his filmography, ZXC is not someone who has gotten roles in big dramas with well-known directors handed to him on a platter out of nowhere. He may have had the skills and luck to land his first ML role via auditions very early in his career, but he only started getting better opportunities after his breakout roles in Skate Into Love and Go Ahead in 2020. His first substantial role of any sort in an S/S+ project was as the second ML in The Heart of Genius in 2021, his first role as the main ML of a big budget project only came with his reprisal of his role as Yuan Zhongxin in Young Blood 2 in 2022, and he was only cast in his first full-length movie in Enlight's So Many Years in 2022 as well - stuff like this may seem trivial to the average c-drama fan because so many rookies have relatively high starting points these days, but these are all milestones that his fans were incredibly glad to see him achieve because we’ve been following his career and seen that steady improvement in the quality of projects he's gotten to work on. It’s something that run of the mill rookies have to go through in pretty much any industry when they’re starting out but most of his works pre-2021 were pretty low budget and some had subpar working conditions. He did multiple rounds of auditions over a few months to land that role in My Huckleberry Friends in 2017; he was originally cast in Young Blood as another role but the ML backed out of the drama so they pushed him to audition for and eventually asked him to play Yuan ZhongXin as a pinch hitter in 2018; his ML role in Skate Into Love materialised because one of the assistant directors worked with him prior and recommended him.

He’s in a better position now in terms of the projects he's being linked with (and he’s probably reached the point where he can afford to be more picky about scripts/genres to some extent) but the upward incline in the quality of the projects that he’s worked on so far has been gradual. Something like JNDZZ would likely be yet another upgrade in terms of the quality of his projects (and I am really hoping the casting rumour is true because I like the role description and I really want to see how his performance will turn out under the guidance of someone like Li Xue). But even getting to that position where he sounds like a plausible candidate for a project like this instead of being the subject of some ridiculous rumour is not something that happened overnight for him. If ZXC continues on the path he’s on now, he will likely wind up as a prime example that it is still very much possible for art college graduates from ordinary middle-class backgrounds to carve out decent careers as Chinese actors even if they weren’t already child stars, don't have the 'right' sort of backing/sponsors, or aren't blessed to have rich / famous / influential family members.

He has a "studio" but he's still an actor under EE Media - his studio didn't even have a public weibo account until last year and his agent is an exec at EE.

Also, he may have topped the art exams for the Beijing Film acting course in 2014 but he didn't enrol there in the end. He's a musical theatre graduate with formal training in singing/dancing/acting and most of the art course entrance exams he topped were for musical theatre courses. There's some old interviews where he's said that his heart was pretty much set on musical theatre at that point in time but he took a bunch of different exams for different majors because his parents wanted him to try out everything he could.

Some, especially those taking the art exams around his age, might have known about him after that because of his unusual streak of number ones but he didn't really become known because of his art test results at all. He wasn't even signed to EE until his second year in college and his actual breakout roles only came in 2020 when he played Li Yubing and He Ziqiu. After he became a bit known as an actor, some of the training institutions he attended while prepping for the art exams started marketing using his name and I would guess that's how his art exam results basically became well-known 😅.

Yeps, seems like some really think that working with traffic stars and becoming traffic is some kind of shortcut to succeeding as an actor - and maybe they are not wrong, that can be a way for someone to get short term success in this industry and it’s probably why the cdrama industry is basically drowning in young MLs and FLs that can’t act to save their lives right now. But I believe time will tell - the fluff, no substance types will find that they are easily replaced by younger stars with time.

I loved Yizhi to bits but The Justice was a pretty flawed drama and I had a lot of regrets about it so I'm all for him playing a similar role again.

I think I saw that bank drama rumour too - the one where the ML is an auditor and is fighting for approval from his fiancee's dad? I didn't get Yizhi vibes from it but it would be another banker role for him. I do hope he has plans to pick up some lighter fare soon 😂.

@littlemaoru Yeps, and it's unfortunate that some have the thought that every project should have popular stars in it to be successful. I feel like even some actors seem to have this type of thinking too ... and imo, that kind of approach won't benefit actors in the long run even if it might help boost their celeb status in the short run.

I think ZXC will probably be playing Liu Jun if the rumours are true - he's a foreign-trained engineer who comes back to China because of his father's poor health and eventually winds up running his father's hardware factory and the story follows him through the years as he fights to keep the factory afloat.

Liu Jun reminds me quite a bit of Cheng Yizhi (one of my favourite ZXC characters) so I'm quite excited to see the rumours about him being cast in this. I really hope he'll get to act in a drama with a good script and a solid production team this time around!

I don't think this kind of drama can rely on the cast's individual popularity to attract viewers. My concern is more whether the scriptwriter can do a good adaptation of the book - the subject matter seems to be pretty heavy and the original book seems to be quite long.

I think it's just a rumour - he hasn't announced his next project after Young Blood 2 wrapped up. Ever since he acted in Bright Future, it seems there are a lot of rumours connecting him to a bunch of other Daylight Ent projects. I hope at least one of these rumours is true!

Ahhh I am always fascinated by his guy’s career development too. He’s been allowed to make some atypical choices - he never really went down that idol / costume drama star route even if he did some dramas from those genres and his team doesn’t seem to give so much importance to whether he’s the lead/supporting role. But it seems to be working out for him lately since he got to work with some good directors/producers in the last year.

I wouldn’t say he is from a company that’s famous for actors. EE is owned by MGTV but they are mainly known for reality show / idol singers. His agency seems quite hands off which probably worked in his favour - a more controlling agency that’s only concerned in milking him dry would likely have forced him to do a bunch of school boy roles right after lin yang in 2017 or romcoms after li yubing in 2020.

Yeah, it looks like he's recovering well from recent pics but I really hope it doesn't mess with his filming schedule. It seems like he's experiencing an upward swing and getting to star in dramas with better production values lately, would hate to see that get derailed.

😂😂 ikr, I'm wondering why MDL is so fast to update with rumours when they're usually so fussy with edits! Although it would be great if some of these came true. I'm hoping Daylight really will cast ZXC as Liu Jun in Jian Nan De Zhi Zao.

You do need to wait awhile for ZXC to show up for more than a few seconds but if you like his acting, I would give it a shot. It's one of his better dramas for me and Pei Zhi is probably one of the more complex / darker roles he's played to date.

There's some and it is definitely a powerful motivator for some characters. But the drama focuses more on family and self-realization for me.

Ahhh I hope the rumor is true. It seems like it's been ages since ZXC did something lighthearted.

https://twitter.com/ultra_melons/status/1603712225566654466 - They released a short preview today! ZXC and the rest of the cast looks good - you can tell that they had a more decent budget this time around.