Lucy Liu opens up about facing systemic racism early on in her career

When Lucy Liu moved to L.A. to pursue a career in acting after receiving her college degree in Asian languages and culture, she knew that it would be a tough road. But she also says that her naivety and inexperience are exactly what allowed her to push forward to become the trailblazer that many say she is today, despite facing her share of systemic racism early on.“I think I was just too naive and didn’t know what was ahead of me or what I was going to be up against,” she tells the Sydney Morning Herald in an interview for her latest TV series Why Women Kill. “I had some idea when I got to L.A., because a friend of mine would have 10 auditions in a day or a week and I would have maybe two or three in a month, so I knew it was going to be much more limited for me.”The 51-year-old actress attributes some of her eventual success to downright luck, but also to the fact that her circumstances allowed her to have a nothing-to-lose attitude during so many of those auditions. “I got really lucky with a few jobs, which put me in rooms for auditions where I looked like no other woman in the room. I thought, ‘I don’t even understand why I’m here, but I’m going to give it my all,'” she says. “I think when you are somewhat the black sheep, you don’t really have anything to lose, because they are not necessarily looking for you,” she explains. “So you may as well go for it!”As the article notes, when Liu was first making a name for herself it was on TV series like Ally McBeal and ER (she was on the latter series in a guest-starring role for three episodes). From there she landed buzzworthy roles in films like Charlie’s Angels, Kill Bill, and Chicago, roles that catapulted her into one of the most recognizable actors in the world.“As you go on in life, you start to understand a little bit more what that pop culture was. When I started doing Charlie's Angels and went back to that era to see the representation of those women at that time, I realised they weren't just all kitschy, but they were also incredibly smart and sexy,” Liu says.Aside from starring in the CBS All-Access series Why Women Kill from Desperate Housewives creator Marc Cherry, Liu also recently played the gender-bending role of Watson on CBS’s Elementary opposite Jonny Lee Miller’s Sherlock Holmes for seven seasons. She’s also used her time on television to learn more of the behind-the-scenes trades, like producing and directing. In addition to directing an episode of Why Women Kill, she’s helmed seven episodes of Elementary, an episode of New Amsterdam, and an episode of Law & Order: SVU."Your work is your legacy and you want to be able to do more each time, and change so you can continue to have some kind of value," Liu says in the interview. "You don't want people thinking of you as just someone who dated someone and getting distracted from your work."[video_embed id='1989099']Before you go: Bestselling author Nic Stone on the importance of Black representation in YA literature[/video_embed]