LayarHijau — Actress Xu Ruohan has shared Cheng Lei’s habits on the set of the drama The Lament of Autumn (玉簟秋), from a cat sticker he once “stole” in their chats to an instant camera photo that captured only the top of her head. In an interview with Sohu Entertainment, she also discussed the love story of the characters they play.
In this Republican-era romance, Xu Ruohan plays Ye Pingjun, a student, while Cheng Lei plays Yu Changxuan of the Yu family army.
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Xu Ruohan said she first saw Cheng Lei in late 2023 at a Weibo event. “I saw him backstage back then,” she said.
On their chemistry on set, Xu Ruohan described Cheng Lei as an actor who gives back as much as he receives. “Whatever I give him, he returns it. Acting doesn’t work if you play alone. We have to give to each other,” she said.
She pointed to the silver coin scene, one of the best-known moments in the drama. “We had only been filming for a few days and weren’t very close yet. But a good actor can give you something, so I can give it back. Even before we were close, we knew what the other wanted.”
Xu Ruohan also described another side of Cheng Lei. According to her, his first reaction to a difficult question is sometimes to avoid it. While filming a physical scene at Fengtai, Xu Ruohan joked to Cheng Lei that her hand had turned red from being pulled. “He immediately scratched his head and stared,” she said.
In their chat conversations, Xu Ruohan said Cheng Lei uses only a handful of the same stickers, including a baby picture sent by his younger sister. “I have a lot because I love sending stickers. He once stole one of my cat stickers,” she said. Between takes, they also sometimes secretly swap roles. “I imitate the way he talks and deliver his lines,” she said.
On photography, Cheng Lei is known to use a Hasselblad camera. “After filming began, he took a lot of photos of me, and they look great,” Xu Ruohan said. A staff member accompanying the interview said the photo had no file name and was a single 150MB image.
However, the instant camera is said to be Cheng Lei’s weak spot. “I’m clearly standing right here, but the lens points somewhere else. For some reason, all that’s captured is the top of my head,” she said. “Next time, I’ll use my own instant camera to take a photo of him when he’s spacing out.”
Their closeness also shows in the nicknames used on set. A publicity staff member shaded them with a black umbrella printed with a pun that roughly means “don’t look around, look at Dongdong Xixi.” “Our names sound cute when put together, so on set we often made up idioms with the words ‘east’ and ‘west’ for each other,” Xu Ruohan said.
On set, Xu Ruohan is called Xixi and calls Cheng Lei Dongdong. “If he can’t hear me, I just call him ‘Cheng Lei,’” she said with a laugh. On WeChat, she saved Cheng Lei’s contact name as just Dong. “My contact names for other people are usually long, so the short one is easy to spot at a glance,” she said.
On the relationship between Ye Pingjun and Yu Changxuan, Xu Ruohan said the line “Besides by my side, where else can you go?” stands out the most because it captures Ye Pingjun’s situation at a certain point in the story. “Viewers will find out later. At that point, Ye Pingjun really had nowhere else to go.”
If she played truth or dare from Ye Pingjun’s perspective, she would ask Yu Changxuan whether he regrets his final decision to leave Ye Pingjun. “That ‘leave’ is in quotation marks, so just wait and see,” she said. For the dare, she would make Yu Changxuan pick up silver coins.
Xu Ruohan also divided Yu Changxuan’s jealousy into three levels: 40%, 80%, and 100%. According to her, 40% is fairly mild because they have just met, while 80% appears, for example, when Ye Pingjun smiles at Jiang Xueting. “His jealousy is a form of caring. Because there is jealousy early on, he can do the things he does later. It’s a bit of groundwork laid step by step,” Xu Ruohan said.
She also responded to viewer comments questioning why Ye Pingjun stays with Yu Changxuan after seeing her classmate killed. According to Xu Ruohan, that impression appears only in the first few episodes. “Give The Lament of Autumn more time, because the story gets much more complicated later on,” she said. She added that the two characters eventually move toward each other, despite misunderstandings along the way.
Discussing the theme of “a powerful man who bows his head for love,” Xu Ruohan shared her own view. “In my opinion, there is no higher or lower position in a relationship. There is only who falls first and who follows,” she said.
She continued, “I’ve always felt two people in a relationship are equal. I wouldn’t consider someone to be in the upper position just because of their status or circumstances. We just see who can make the other fall first.”
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