Fan Bingbing on ‘Diary of a Mad Old Man,’ International Ambitions

Chinese superstar Fan Bingbing‘s latest role puts her at the center of an unusual dynamic: a Chinese caregiver drawn into the fixation of an aging, stroke-paralyzed Japanese widower.

“Diary of a Mad Old Man,” Wayne Wang‘s adaptation of Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s 1961 novel, is having its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival in the gala presentations section. The film is also a selection at the Busan International Film Festival.

Over a four-decade career, Wang’s credits include “Chan Is Missing” (1982), “The Joy Luck Club” (1993) and “Smoke,” which won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at the 1995 Berlinale.

Fan plays Susu, daughter-in-law and sole caregiver to Utsugi (Lily Franky). She describes Susu’s position as complicated — someone with real influence over Utsugi, but also vulnerable and dependent on the family around her.

The actor resists framing her character as either predator or victim. “I don’t think Susu is someone who is simply trying to control Utsugi,” she says. “She understands the influence she has over him, but in many ways, she is also vulnerable and dependent on the family.” For Fan, the power at stake is less about domination than survival: a woman working with whatever leverage her circumstances allow her. Rather than settling the question of who is using whom, Fan says she was more drawn to the emotional exchange between two people who both need something from each other.

That refusal to settle on a single reading extends to how Fan and Franky calibrated the relationship’s tone on set. Working closely with Wang to find the right register, the two actors treated the bond as something built on desire and imagination rather than conventional physical intimacy, letting Susu’s willingness to draw close or pull away shift scene to scene so no single interpretation of the relationship ever hardens into place. “There is tenderness, desire, dependency and also discomfort,” Fan says. “All of these things can exist together.”

Tanizaki’s original Susu is a deliberately provocative figure, and Fan says she wanted to hold onto that boldness and mystery while giving the character more visible wounds. “I wanted the audience to see that behind her provocative side, there is also loneliness and vulnerability,” she says. “She is not simply one thing.”

Susu’s identity as a Chinese woman inside a Japanese family, itself a departure from Tanizaki’s original text, became one of the production’s more pointed choices. Fan says the character’s outsider status shaped how she approached nearly every scene, drawing a direct line between Susu’s position and her own experience working across borders. “When you enter another culture, you are always observing: how people communicate, what they don’t say, the relationships, etc.,” she says. “Sometimes being an outsider makes you more sensitive to these things.”

Wang, who has built much of his career around characters moving between cultures, never pushed Fan to play Susu as Japanese, she says. Instead, he encouraged her to draw on her own instincts, having spent years navigating multiple cultures himself and understanding the particular feeling of being inside a culture while still observing it from the outside.

Fan says a woman like Susu today occupies a different social position, with more awareness of her own choices, than a woman would have had in the early 1960s. “So I didn’t want to approach her sexuality as something that automatically makes her immoral or provocative,” she says. “She understands her body, her attractiveness and the effect she has on Utsugi, and I think she has the right to have that awareness.”

At the same time, she says, being a modern woman doesn’t mean being completely free. “Financial dependence, family expectations, loneliness and unequal relationships still exist today,” Fan says. That contradiction is what interested her most: Susu has agency, but she also has limitations.

Fan says she deliberately avoided deciding, even for herself, how Susu truly feels about Utsugi at any given moment. She didn’t want to resolve for audiences whether Susu loves him, pities him, uses him or feels some combination of all three at once. “Human emotions are rarely completely pure or simple,” she says. “I hope everyone can have their own interpretation of her.”

The part marks a sharp departure from the large-scale Chinese productions and star-driven roles that have long defined Fan’s public image. At this stage of her career, she says she’s more concerned with whether a character moves her than whether it fits any particular image of her, adding that she still wants to discover parts of herself she hasn’t shown before. She says she enjoys roles that let audiences forget they’re watching Fan Bingbing and simply see the character.

The role continues a run of international collaborations Fan has built since 2023, when “Green Night,” directed by Han Shuai, premiered in the Panorama section of the Berlin Film Festival. In 2025, she starred as a shamanistic healer in Chong Keat Aun’s Malaysian period drama “Mother Bhumi,” which premiered in the main competition of the Tokyo International Film Festival, picked up eight nominations at the Golden Horse Awards and won her best leading actress. “For me it is not about choosing international cinema over Chinese cinema,” she says. “I simply want to work with good filmmakers and good stories, wherever they come from.”

On what she is looking for next, Fan says the scale of a production matters less to her than the strength of a filmmaker’s voice and whether a character offers her something she hasn’t played before. “For me, cinema should be able to cross borders,” she says. “If there is a filmmaker with a unique vision and a story that truly moves me, wherever they come from, I would love to work with them.”

“Diary of a Mad Old Man” also stars Saito Takumi and Kudoh Youki.