Most families aren’t like the one featured in Blood and Water, and we should all be thankful for that.
If all families were as dysfunctional as the fictional billionaire Xie family, most of us would be exhausted and angst-ridden 24/7, and OMNI’s new multilingual drama wouldn’t be nearly as engrossing.
The title of the series harkens back to that famous proverb, ‘Blood runs thicker than water,’ and audiences will witness the truth (or lack thereof) of this saying in action, says Elfina Luk.
The Vancouver actress portrays Anna Xie, one of three children born to a wealthy and tyrannical Vancouver-based real estate developer, in the locally produced family drama.
Two of the three adult children (Anna and one of her brothers) are making papa proud; the same can’t be said of their brother.
The eight-episode series kicks off with the black-sheep brother at the centre of a murder investigation.
“As this family is being interrogated and investigated and pulled apart, you’re able to see, ‘How thick does blood run? How close are these people? How much do they actually know each other?’” says Luk. “And it’s based in Vancouver, so you get to see the landscape in action.”
Luk describes Anna as “quite strong. She’s basically working to take over the family business, and she’s had to mature a bit to be able to handle the business world,” says Luk, whose previous credits include Smallville, Caprica, and recurring roles on Da Vinci’s City Hall and The Guard.
“I feel like she’s the glue between the characters on the show, because she has a lot of interaction with Steph Song’s character, the cop that’s investigating the family, and she’s the one who’s standing up to her, and reflecting back to her what she doesn’t want to see.”
Being one of the few true multilingual series on television, Blood and Water required Luk to deliver lines in three languages: English, Mandarin, and Cantonese.
Doing so impacted her performance in surprising ways, she says.
“There’s a certain cadence that comes with speaking a different language,” says Luk. “There were moments when I thought, ‘That’s very Asian of me,’ or, ‘I’ve seen my mom act this way.’ I found things I wouldn’t normally find if I were speaking English.
Luk’s multi-faceted Blood and Water role (“From an actor point of view, Anna gets to go through what any actor would be excited to have the opportunity to go through”) is a culmination of a dream that began in childhood.
Her mother wanted her to be an accountant, says Luk, but despite several attempts at professional number-crunching, she just couldn’t make a go of it, because her desire to be an actress was too strong.
In her 20s – after booking a couple of acting jobs – Luk came face to face with her childhood desires when she unearthed a letter she’d written to herself decades before and hidden away in her closet.
“[The letter] said, ‘All I want to do one day is act, sing, and dance,’ and when I read that, I sat there and I started crying,” says Luk.
“I didn’t even remember writing that to myself. It was a deep, hidden desire that I wasn’t sharing with anybody, because it didn’t even seem possible, so when I read that, I was like, ‘Oh, okay, this is something that I’ve always wanted to do,’ and it made so much sense that I was doing it, and I was where I was.”
Blood and Water also stars Steph Song, Peter Outerbridge, Fiona Fu, Simu Liu, Oscar Hsu, Loretta Yu, Osric Chau, and Russell Yuen.
• Blood and Water premieres on OMNI Television on Nov. 8.
