There's a scene in the second episode of Marco Polo, the new Netflix blockbuster, that is whiz-bang fearsome.
It involves a royal concubine named Mei Lin. There has been a shift in power in the Mongol court, and some battle-hardened guys arrive to confront Mei Lin, believing they now have the power to demand sexual favours from her. Mei Lin, dressed only in a silk robe, initially leads them on. Then she attacks. Naked and wielding the nearest weapon, she destroys them. She soars, strikes and matches their savagery with her elegant strength.
It's at that moment that Marco Polo (starting Dec. 12 on Netflix) really takes flight as mighty entertainment.
Canadian actress Olivia Cheng, who plays Mei Lin, is modest about that pivotal scene and her role in it. "That one scene took two full days to shoot," she said during a recent chat on a promotional tour in Toronto. "That's what I remember. I was exhausted after it, but it looks magnificent. Not thanks to me, alone, but thanks to the world-class stunt trainers I worked with. I trained non-stop and, boy, it ups your game when you're working with the best."
The Vancouver-based Cheng, 35, is modest about a lot of things. Mostly, she's still getting used to starring in a blockbuster and being interviewed, over and over again, about Marco Polo. A few years ago, Cheng was doing the interviewing. She spent a year as a reporter for Global TV in Edmonton, her hometown, and did a stint reporting for the celebrity-news show ET Canada.
But her ambition was to act, and that career began in earnest when she landed a role in the 2006 western miniseries Broken Trail, shot near Calgary. Then came a role in The Rape of Nanking (2007), a feature documentary, and countless one-off roles in Vancouver-made series. Then came Marco Polo.
"They say they just saw something in my audition tape that put me on the short list," she says with a faint air of amazement. "I went to L.A. to talk it over and I got it. Mei Lin is just a girl from the wrong side of the tracks who reaches this exalted goal of royal concubine. She's very driven, very determined. Me, I was overwhelmed for a while. I can't capture in words how grand this production is. There are 27 countries involved; the costumes and stunts are Oscar-calibre."
Cheng isn't the only unknown with a leading role in Marco Polo. Produced by the Weinstein Company and aimed at expanding the Netflix footprint around the world, the series sells old-fashioned spectacle and grandeur, not marquee names. The title character is played by Italian actor Lorenzo Richelmy. This Marco spends three years travelling with his father from Venice to Mongolia in the 13th century. Once there, dad promptly offers his son as servant/adviser to the emperor Kublai Khan (British actor Benedict Wong), and the young, callow man is thrown into the impenetrable world of warriors, machinations against China and Khan's malice-filled court. Probably the best-known actor is Joan Chen, who plays Khan's wife.
There's an odd sort of synergy to this strange, bloated and mass-appeal project from Netflix. It's about trade routes and selling something exotic to and from distant places. That's what made the real Marco Polo a legend. And here, in the telling of the tale, Netflix is making a grand bid for world domination by establishing itself across a great swath of the world. Not with Hollywood glamour, but with a fabulous yarn out of the East.
Marco Polo, created and partly written by John Fusco (best known for the martial arts movie The Forbidden Kingdom), is the sort of production that seems, in style and tone, distant from Netflix's House of Cards and Orange is the New Black. It's hoary, bulging with the familiar – a blind kung-fu master, much talk of the "nobility" of warriors and terror and blood that don't turn out to be that terrifying. It often resembles a slow-moving 1970s network mini-series.
The 10-part series is beyond big. It's massive. It was shot in Italy, Kazakhstan and Malaysia, has a cast of thousands, and is reported to have cost $90-million. All this to make both intimate and fantastic the life of the famous explorer.
If there's sizzle, it is provided by Mei Lin and what Cheng calls "the tenacious warrior spirit" of the concubine. She says Marco Polo is "a visual feast, but it's also grounded in something very real and rather poignant in the main female characters. It's about relationships and the necessity of internal strength for women. It's a period piece, but human nature hasn't changed much since the 13th century."
"This is a killer role." she adds. "And I learned a lot about the period. I'm a Chinese-Canadian actor, and a lot resonates for me. But it's really about what the audience takes away from Mei Lin and the story. It would be an honour, I think, if people related Mei Lin to the situation of women today. I'm proud of Mei Lin, and proud of Marco Polo."
She has every reason to be. After seeing that crucial and rousing fight scene, what the viewer wants is more of Mei Lin and Olivia Cheng.