China’s leading foreign actor on his first book, The Eunuch, and getting to grips with the ruthless Chinese film industry
- Jonathan Kos-Read, aka Cao Cao, would have had no trouble drawing on his time in China’s movie biz to evoke the treacherous atmosphere in his imperial whodunit
- He talks about screenwriting, being ‘erased’ from productions early in his career and how he was so shy as a child he hid in bushes before class
Jonathan Kos-Read has built a successful life by making seemingly unpredictable decisions. In 1997, he swapped New York for Beijing, despite knowing hardly any Mandarin, even fewer people and with little in the way of a plan. He auditioned for a low-budget movie, Mei Shi Zhao Shi (Looking for Trouble), on the strength of an advertisement in an English-language newspaper and a teenage love of acting. From such random choices has grown fame. Known across mainland China as Cao Cao, Kos-Read is “by far the leading foreign actor working in the country”, according to The New York Times.
Speaking from his current home, in Barcelona, Spain, the 48-year-old distils these crazy twists of fate into one pithy sentence: “I always wanted to live my life like a character in a novel.”
The analogy is more than appropriate, because Kos-Read has performed another left turn and written his first work of fiction. The result is, as you might expect, pleasingly unexpected. Titled The Eunuch, the story begins with the murder of a seemingly junior concubine in the court of the young Jin emperor Xizong. The investigation is assigned to a quietly clever courtier named Gett, the titular eunuch who must solve a devilish locked-room mystery while navigating Byzantine court politics, where finding the truth can get you killed.
Kos-Read does an impressive job of evoking the treacherous atmosphere of the Jin hierarchy, which he regards as a somewhat neglected part of China’s history. “Like any high-level organisation, where there’s a lot of money, a lot at stake and everybody is really f***ing smart, there are only so many spots at the top. The people there are so good, they will erase you before you even know what you did wrong.”
The portrait owes much to Kos-Read’s research, but it seems he also drew on his own encounters with ruthless elites. “I work in show business at a reasonably high level, where the deals are big and the egos are big.” The names are big, too: Kos-Read has worked alongside Donnie Yen Ji-dan, Aaron Kwok Fu-shing, Kelly Lin Hsi-lei, Chen Kun, Angelababy and Mike Tyson.
