Go Behind the Scenes of <i>Shadow and Bone</i> with Jessie Mei Li (2024)

"This is mine and Archie [Renaux]'s first day on set together in season two. Archie had to come out a bit later than the rest of us, so I hadn't seen him in ages. So this was our first day back on set playing Mal and Alina—we wanted to snap a quick pic to commemorate being back together."

It was an "absolute joy" sharing so many scenes with Archie this season, Li says. "Archie's wonderful, we're such good friends. He's a lot of fun to be around. It was really great being able to explore our character's relationship more. Obviously there's no one else better to do these intimate on-screen relationships with than friends that you trust completely."

"We just simply had to snap a picture with one of our head stuntmen, Géza [Kovács], who played the sea whip. He gave 110%; he was doing all the noises," Li says.

She continues, "It was one of those moments when I looked around and I thought, oh my god, what are we doing? We were splashing around in this tank with a man in a green morph suit, everyone screaming and shouting, I'm pretending to do magic... It was just one of those, I just sat there and thought, I get paid for this, this is fantastic."

On a fantasy show like Shadow and Bone, Li is often acting off green screens—but it doesn't phase her. "What I love about acting is in order to feel like you're in it, you've got to lose yourself and I'm quite good at just forgetting what was going on with me, Jessie, and getting into it," she says. "Because you have to—when all this silly nonsense is happening, you've just got to commit, and everyone just gives it 100% and that's why I think when you then watch it back, even for us who were there, you think, 'I can't believe that wasn't actually there!' It was always very funny. There was a lot of our poor stuntmen in green morph suits."

Here, Li snaps a selfie with Patrick "Paddy" Gibson, who plays Sturmhond/Nikolai Lanstov, in the makeup trailer.

"That would have been probably very, very early in the morning," Li says. "I think I was probably just shocked by how handsome Paddy is in his Nikolai outfit. Obviously, you know, we start off the first few episodes with Nikolai playing a different character—I think I was just quite taken with the cravat situation he's got going on."

Li continues, "I absolutely adore Paddy. I spent a lot of time with Paddy and Archie and one of the loveliest things is that had the sweetest bromance—I've never seen two people be so platonically in love! It really added to their characters, as well. Paddy was just, from day one, right in there with everyone and just an absolute joy."

"This is myself and Danielle [Galligan], who plays Nina. We were actually just having a lovely day out visiting—I think it was Jack [Wolfe] and Kit [Young] were working that day. So we went to go visit a Weyland and Jesper scene, and just thought we'd snap a quick picture in one the sets," Li says. "Sometimes when I had days off, I would go visit set and just see how everyone was doing. I love being there so much and you learn so much from just absorbing what's going on around you."

One day, the actress would love to step behind the camera and direct something, but way down the line. "I feel like I've got a lot to learn, but I do have a real interest in it and I get all zingy and excited when there's a cool moment or when a director gives some really interesting direction or puts together a scene in a way that I absolutely was not thinking about," Li says.

"I thought this photo was interesting because it shows we've got our weird COVID goggles on—this particular scene would have been probably around March of 2022," Li says. "It's very strange doing all the social distancing whilst filming, it adds a whole other layer of complication to filming."

She adds, "This day I remember being particularly exciting. The director we had for this block, Laura [Belsey], she was absolutely brilliant and some really cool shots, really cool one takes. I felt like I learned a lot from watching some of these scenes being done, it was really exciting."

The fight sequences, in particular, in Shadow and Bone, "look so chaotic and so spontaneous, but it's not at all. The magic of it is everyone's performances and the timing—everyone's hitting their marks exactly. It's so tricky—when you're having to run around and you have suddenly told you have to stop on this exact mark on the floor whilst reacting to everything. But again, the team does such an amazing job. It's such a wicked crew, so it's amazing watching it back, and being like, god that really works!"

"With Zoë [Wanamaker], my babes! I love this woman so much. We're not the same age, but I think we're actually the same person, A lot of us in the Shadow and Bone cast are in our late twenties, early thirties, then you have the odd person like Zoë, who is of a different generation—but she'd still come to the parties with us! She's honestly one of my favorite people on this planet, she's an absolute firecracker. She's one of my inspirations in life."

In this photo, Li says, "we're waiting to find out when we're going to set, but we both had quite long hair and makeup processes, so we did a lot of chit chatting in hair and makeup."

Her favorite time of day was coming in for hair and makeup. "They're like family, the hair and makeup team," she says. "I have my aunties and my mothers and my my sisters and we just chit chat. It's a nice way to start the day."

"Just dangling around!" Li jokes of this photo, which was behind the scenes of one of the final episodes. "That was very close to the end of the filming, at that point, it was very much time for me to have a good sleep."

"This is at the height of my exhaustion," Li says. "I've given up hope at this point! We're filming the last two episodes—and people who know a lot about Hungary as a country will know that Hungary gets very, very cold in winter and very, very hot in summer. We were lucky to experience both ends of the spectrum! So quite a lot of the first few episodes when, hilariously, a lot of my costumes are quite thin, or we were in water or something was when it's minus degrees. As soon as we get to this bloomin' sandpit—where they filmed Dune, actually—I'm in a full wool coat and it was like 34° Celsius. It was so hot, and I'm not somebody who takes well to hot weather. So I'm probably just dangling there, wishing I was in a cold spot."

Season two of Shadow and Bone is now streaming on Netflix.

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