shirt. High Society
shorts. 3.1 Phillip Lim
shoes. Francesca Bellavita
hat. Piers Atkinson
Poppy Liu is zooming in from New York City. She is at the tail end of the press tour for Boots Riley’s highly anticipated surrealist film ‘I Love Boosters’. Despite a full schedule, she is vibrant. As it turns out, the city itself might be acting as her battery. “I’m just generally really energised whenever I’m in New York,” Liu admits right off the bat, noting the stark contrast to Los Angeles. Our conversation immediately veers into the cosmic geography of cities and the urban fables that make New York feel so alive. Naturally, this triggers a deep dive into astro-travel (or astrocartography), the esoteric practice of mapping your birth chart against the globe to find the coordinates where your career, creativity, or lineage are destined to thrive. Before jumping into our questions, we make a mutual vow: Liu promises to run her birth chart through an astrocartography calculator right after the interview. And later, we can confirm: New York is, without a doubt, a major node for her energy.
It is a fitting start for an interview with the actress, producer and doula, whose inner world is dictated by a fiercely driven Capricorn Sun, an emotionally profound Pisces Rising, and a beautifully mischievous Scorpio Moon. In conversation with Schön!, Poppy Liu opens up about stepping into the unflinching determination of her character, Jianhu, the radical history of political satire, and why she built duplex co-ops and cabbage gyms for her backyard chickens.
dress. Lily Phellera
bodysuit. Simkhai
collar. Bootzy Couture
opposite
full look. Erik Charlotte
How do you feel your astrology manifests in your life?
As a Capricorn, I’m incredibly career-focused. Even when everything else in my life — my health, my mental health, my home — is kind of falling apart, not my career. I just will not drop the ball on that. As a Pisces Rising, I am such a softy at heart. I’m very sensitive, empathetic, curious about people, and I care deeply. My Scorpio moon means that I’m kind of a freak, too. I can find levity in dark things, or I don’t feel scared to go to dark places in myself. There’s something a little mischievous about it, but it’s also a bit intense. As I’ve gotten older, I have more agency around the intensity of my inner world than I did as a kid. I was a very serious, worried kid growing up. I don’t remember ever lacking worry about the world.
That’s a very Pisces thing. I’m a Pisces too, so I relate! What parts of yourself were you able to take with you into Jianhu’s character?
Personally, I related quite a lot to Jianhu. It was really meaningful to play a fully Chinese character. I moved here when I was 2 and grew up here, so I’m very Americanized in many ways, yet I also feel very strong emotional ties to China. Being able to play a character whose people are in China and who is trying to help them feels really meaningful and, in a way, healing. Ultimately, her character journey is about the process of becoming radicalised: seeing injustice around her and trying to make a change. That spirit of social commitment is something I really love about her, and I hope to always tend to that flame inside myself, too.
Jianhu also has a really strong sense of determination. Her objective through the movie is like an arrow, straightforward, unflinching, and she is going to go for it at any cost. There’s a part of me that can be that too. Maybe it’s the Capricorn side, where when I have a goal in mind or a fixation about something, I need to do it, and I have to go there.
You have early theatre-kid roots, and you performed in absurdist and experimental theatre at university. How was working on a project that was a mixture of punk, surrealism, and political commentary?
Stylistically and in terms of messaging, this is the dream combination. I was doing a lot of absurdism; Edward Albee, Eugène Ionesco, mainly because of my theatre mentors in college, Adrian and Simona, who were both just so Eastern European. We would do all these brutalist renderings of, for example, ‘Spring Awakening’ and plays by Heiner Müller.
There’s an interesting link between satire, absurdism, and political commentary. I feel incredibly grateful that this is the movie I get to do for my first-ever theatrical release. It is exactly at the intersection of everything that I love and care about. The bar is set so high now for the future films and directors I want to work with. Inshallah, I can keep meeting that bar over and over again with whatever is to come in my career.
A positive surprise was that the film also features mostly women, especially as main protagonists.
Yes, all women on the call sheet from numbers 1 through 6, essentially the Velvet Gang, were all women of colour. This high-fashion, absurdist, revolutionary world is led by three Black girls from Oakland, a Chinese factory worker who, by magical means, ends up here, and a Latina coder, which is so amazing. The energy of that could also be felt in the way Boots directed and in how very deliberate and thoughtful he was in his casting. Once we were on set, he placed so much trust in each of us. He just let us discover what the chemistry was between us; a lot of it was really organic.
It’s so good to see, honestly!
Yes! Boots brought us together in such a strong vision, but then also stepped aside to let us do our thing. He really knows when to take up no space at all and just let you live in this world. He leaves ample room for whimsy and discovery and is a true collaborator at heart.
You wear some incredible bootleg fashion in the film. What are your thoughts on bootleg culture?
It’s so fascinating to me. I went to high school in Shanghai, where there’s a massive counterfeit market. There is a deep irony to it because often it’s the same factory that makes both the luxury brand and the bootleg version. So, instead of paying for the physical item, you’re paying for the story and the cultural capital wrapped around the brand.
Our wardrobe geniuses, Shirley Kurata and Lindsay Hartman, thrifted and sourced locally in Atlanta. Their choices perfectly mirror the film’s core questions: who owns the means of production, who owns cultural capital, and who profits from ideas that are iterated over and over again? Creativity is everywhere, but without access to production capital, ideas often can’t go very far.
On this press tour, Lindsay, who became my stylist, and I made a point of almost exclusively wearing Asian designers. The big fashion houses frequently pull inspiration from these micro-level indie designers who are shaping culture before it trickles down into fast and high fashion. I want to be as close as possible to that organic source of idea exchange, supporting artists who create hyperspecifically for their own communities and identities.
top + skirt. Erik Charlotte
shoes. Jeffrey Campbell
opposite
full look. Mark Gong
The film is very much about nuance and duality. What does duality mean to you?
We are all living in a contradiction. We exist within and are complicit in a capitalist system that has caused the greatest harm on this earth. Every empire is ultimately driven by capital, from foreign invasions for resources to the exploitation of the prison-industrial complex and ICE detention centres. The indentured servitude of incarcerated people exists to serve capitalism. Duality means realising we all play a role in this system. Capitalism is a cancer to the world. There is no part of our day separated from capitalism, and it’s easy to feel hopeless when the billionaire class rules everything.
How do you push up against something you are intrinsically part of? On an individual level, I think it comes down to how you choose to exist. The greatest lie of capitalism is individualism. In reality, we are deeply interdependent and interconnected, making mutual aid a necessity. If my tax dollars fund US weaponry used to bomb Gaza, it is also my responsibility to contribute to mutual aid funds for those same families. We have a responsibility to each other. All the jargon and big concepts aside, capitalism as an entity is almost untouchable with how big it is. But what we can hold onto is how we respond in a crisis. Are you trying to fit as many people as possible onto your lifeboat, or are you abandoning them? Framing our responsibility to each other that way feels revolutionary. I fundamentally don’t feel okay if everyone isn’t okay, so I focus on what I can do within my own sphere of influence.
That’s why we need communities and why we need our villages, right? How do you implement this into your life?
Now it’s much more important to me to find people whose values align with mine than to find people with similar identities. Skin folk isn’t always kin folk, I think. I went through phases of my life where all my friends were queer Asians, and I thought that was the only way I could connect with somebody. Having shared thoughts, values, and principles is much more important to me now, and anyone can embody that.
The film reminds me of ‘The Wizard of Oz’ with a clearly anti-capitalist message. It is also one of the most saturated and vibrant releases in a long time. What is your favourite colour?
The first thing that came to mind was my toddler’s favourite colour. My kid is three and a half, and right now, his favourite colours are yellow, red, blue, black, white, pink, and purple. I love that his world is so colourful. I really love that about Boots Riley as well, the maximalism of him and his world. It’s the exact opposite of the desaturation in storytelling and media. The artistic spirit is simply impossible to squash down. The more the industry tries to consolidate and merge, the louder the creatives and the artists go in the opposite direction, fighting it. Through the colour and beauty, there is a stance. They can’t take that away.
dress. Lily Phellera
bodysuit. Simkhai
collar. Bootzy Couture
opposite
shirt. High Society
shorts. 3.1 Phillip Lim
hat. Piers Atkinson
Tech and AI are clawing themselves into the fashion scene as well. With the Met Gala as a recent example. What are your thoughts on how they are impacting the creativity of the future?
We are being force-fed this lie that optimisation is what we should want. Why would we want to optimise the creative process? To me, creativity requires slowness, reflection, and time to sit with yourself and digest the world. Back when I did theatre in New York, we would sometimes spend two years devising, just to do a six-week run of the play. Part of the art is the creation process. It’s about working through something difficult and creating beauty on the other side. Technology can’t do that because it doesn’t have a lived experience to digest.
To pivot from the tech elite to something much closer to earth: is keeping backyard chickens the official first step towards the revolution?
It’s a piece of it. Actually, I believe we need to catalogue the hard skills among ourselves, our friends, and our community. Especially as artists, no offence, but I don’t really need more poets in my bunker. If you’re a poet, come with another skill too. Are you a plumber? Are you a carpenter? Are you an electrician? For me, the hard skills I’m cultivating are growing vegetables, becoming a gardener, and learning to care for plants and seasonal foods.
However, I do have some controversial takes on my chickens. My flock, in particular, costs me much more to keep alive than the eggs they give me are worth. But they’re my pets, and I love them. They’re all really bougie; I just bought them a dust bath, my friend built them a duplex chicken coop, and they even have a chicken gym.
I love that. They have the best life with you!
They do! They’re just not very utilitarian, I guess. Some chickens are probably just supposed to look cool and have a good life.
top. Erik Charlotte
photography. Anna Koblish
fashion. Lindsey Hartman
talent. Poppy Liu
hair. Tammy Yi
make up. Michelle Chung
production. Cassidy Cocke
art department. Sadie Jean Spezzano
photography assistant. Morganne Boulden
location. FD Photo Studio
interview. Fiona Frommelt
As you might have heard, June has been an eventful month for New York City thus far. Landing amidst the fanfare of the NBA Finals and preparations for the World Cup, the 
