Simu Liu loves making animated movies — for good reason.
“I’ve definitely shown up at recording sessions in pajamas and flip-flops,” he tells me while promoting his new animated Netflix family film “In Your Dreams. “It’s really awesome. All that matters is you’re giving the vocal performance.”
Directed and co-written by Alexander Woo and Erik Benson, “In Your Dreams” follows two young siblings (Jolie Hoang-Rappaport and Elias Janssen) who meet the mythical Sandman (Omid Djalili) in their dreams and ask him to keep their parents (Liu and Cristin Milioti) together after they suspect they’re on the brink of splitting up.
Liu’s character is a musician, so it’s no surprise he was asked, alongside Milioti, to sing an original song for the movie. “I don’t think I signed on knowing that we were gonna do an original song, but we did, and I got to do it with Cristin, which is so amazing,” Liu says. “She’s a fantastic singer, like Broadway level.”
When I remind Liu that Milioti won a Grammy in 2013 for best musical theater album for her work in “Once: A New Musical,” he cracks, “I was nominated for an MTV Movie Award for best fight, which I lost to Sydney Sweeney.”
At one point in the movie, the Sandman talks about how dreams can depict how “perfect the world could be, how perfect it should be,” so I ask Liu what’s his idea of a perfect world. “My god, the internet doesn’t exist,’ he says. “Maybe phones don’t exist…Everyone is talking to each other. And more important than that, everyone is listening to each other and people lead with acceptance and curiosity and they’re not leading with, ‘I’m gonna try to dunk on this person on social media so that I get likes.’ They’re saying, ‘Hey, we’re all stuck here together so let’s just figure out a way to get along and not kill each other while we’re at it.’”
That said, Liu has become known for speaking up on social media against right-leaning politics. The possibility of backlash doesn’t worry him. “I probably should be more scared of it,” he says.
But the need to speak his mind overcomes any fears. “I just feel like there’s something about the internet that makes people just crazy,” Liu says. “There’s something about the publicness of it and where people love being the guy to put someone else down [or] put an entire group of people down. I am so not for that energy.”
He praises people like Melissa Barrera, his co-star in the upcoming television series “The Copenhagen Test,” for being “wonderfully courageous and outspoken.” The actress was fired from the “Scream” franchise in 2023 after producers deemed her pro-Palestine social posts as antisemitic.
“That is like the bravest woman I have ever met and the most outspoken and most fearless and the most assured in what she believes in is right,” Liu says. “Regardless of whether or not you agree with her or everything she has to say, you can’t not respect that.”
Earlier this year, Liu reprised his role as Shang-Chi in the upcoming Marvel film “Avengers: Doomsday.”
“It was really awesome, exciting,” he says. “So many actors that I grew up watching, and to get to kind of play in that sandbox with them…it’s a dream come true. I grew up watching superhero movies and wanting to believe that the outcasts and the nerds and the weirdos could find it in themselves to have superpowers and save the day. That’s what 12-year-old me clung on to. I still believe, for better or for worse, in the power of what those movies stand for today.”
Liu hits back at the wave of criticism that’s been hurled at superhero movies. “It’s kind of fashionable now to hate on it,” he says. “I think there are valid critiques of the way that movies are made, the way that production budgets are handled, I think that there are a lot of valid things to say, but this idea of shitting on superhero movies as a genre, I don’t know. I don’t know I because I am speaking as somebody who just absolutely loved watching them as a kid.”
“In Your Dreams” is available on Netflix.
