Up close with the man behind Xue Buhui

Zhang Haiyu, a 28-year-old actor who has quickly risen to fame as one of the freshest rising stars on screen.[Photo by Feng Yongbin/China Daily]

TV comic turns out to be full of surprises when you sit down for a real-life chat

Do you know Xue Buhui? The 28-year-old single woman has different occupations, such as flight attendant, a waitress of a hot pot restaurant, a taxi driver and an intern doctor. She wears a fringed chin-length bob haircut and chronically discombobulated in her way of solving problems. Like her name indicates, she never learns to do the right thing.

You may have met her through a variety show, Tonight Parliaments, which was hosted by Jin Xing, one of the country's most popular TV hostess and aired by Shanghai Dragon TV from September to December of 2016. If so, you will never forget her.

In each show broadcast on weekends, the woman appears in an eight-minute comic sketch and the character was vividly brought to life by a 28-year-old actor, Zhang Haiyu, a man, who has quickly risen to fame as one of the freshest rising stars on screen.

In person, he's a quiet, soft-spoken and serious young man, very unlike his screen images.

He is sensitive as an actor but he says that he has no big ambition.

Since Tonight Parliaments, Zhang says, he has received lots of invitations from TV stations, film and TV series producers. But he turned most of them down.

"It's not about money and I am not afraid of being forgotten in this fast-paced industry. I have my own tempo and I want to take it slow," Zhang says.

In fact, he is busy lately because he has just released a rap piece, called The Song of Belt and Road Initiative, his first song, which was a collaboration with People's Daily on the occasion of the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation held in Beijing this month.

Also, Zhang has the lead role - a car washer named Shi Feilou, working in Thailand - in the fifth season of the popular internet comic drama Two Idiots, now being broadcast by China's online video giant iQiyi. Besides promotions for the internet drama, he is also preparing for a movie project, about which no details have been revealed yet.

"For audiences, it's an overnight thing. But for me, it's a long process," says Zhang, sitting in a gallery located in outskirt of Beijing, recalling his "instant" success with on Tonight Parliaments.

This is not a complaint. For one thing, he doesn't consider the wait for success to be painful. For another, what he has achieved is just the beginning.