Callina Liang Studied Chun-Li’s Moves and Transformed for Street Fighter

Playing Chun-Li in a live-action Street Fighter film comes with an unusually clear assignment: audiences already know how the character should move. Callina Liang, who plays Chun-Li in the forthcoming adaptation, says she approached that challenge with intensive physical preparation and a close study of the fighter’s long game history.

Liang’s stated routine included eating 12 eggs a day, having a meal every two hours, and studying Chun-Li’s moves across the character’s appearances in the games. She also said her thighs grew by more than 6.5 centimetres in the months before filming, an effort to bring her physique closer to Chun-Li’s famously powerful silhouette.

Her motivation, Liang explained, was rooted in being a fan herself and in recognizing just how much Chun-Li means to players. She said she did not want to let fans down, and that she wanted to give the role everything she had rather than leave with regrets.

Why Chun-Li’s movement is the real test

Chun-Li is not simply a character with an outfit to reproduce. In a fighting game, a character’s identity is built from animation: their stance, balance, kicks, speed, spacing, transitions and signature attacks all communicate who they are before any dialogue begins.

That makes Liang’s decision to study Chun-Li’s complete move history meaningful. A move list is the catalog of actions a player can make with a character. It can include attacks, special moves and other distinctive techniques. For an actor, studying that material is not necessarily about copying game inputs or treating every animation as literal choreography. It is a way to identify the visual vocabulary fans associate with a fighter.

Chun-Li’s identity has long been inseparable from leg strength and precision. Liang’s focus on movement and lower-body development therefore addresses a central part of the character rather than a surface-level resemblance. The aim appears to have been to make the film’s version feel connected to the games in posture and action, not merely in costume.

The food details have understandably drawn attention, but they should not eclipse the larger point: Liang describes a role-specific preparation process. A performer’s training and nutrition plan is not a universal template, and the available information does not establish the full medical, coaching or production support behind it. What is clear is that the approach involved sustained work across both physical conditioning and character research.

A fan-facing standard, not just an action-role workout

Liang framed her preparation in direct relation to the audience. Chun-Li is an iconic video-game figure with decades of recognition behind her, and characters with that kind of legacy arrive with a built-in visual memory. Fans may disagree on what matters most in an adaptation, but they can usually tell when the people making it have considered the original character’s defining traits.

That is why “made by fans, for fans,” as Liang described the collective effort, is a useful ambition but also a demanding one. It raises the bar beyond broad references or familiar names. Faithfulness can show up in the small decisions: how a fighter carries their weight, whether a stance is recognizable, and whether combat styles feel distinct rather than interchangeable.

Liang’s account suggests she viewed Chun-Li as a responsibility as much as a career opportunity. Her physical transformation was part of that effort, while the move study speaks to the separate task of translating a game character’s expression into a medium with real bodies, cameras and edited action.

The character research reportedly extended across the cast

The attention to game-specific details was not limited to Liang. Noah Centineo, who plays Ken, has said that Jon Valera researched every character in the film so that their individual signature styles from Capcom’s games would be represented.

That distinction matters in an ensemble built around combatants. In a fighting game, character differentiation is fundamental. Fighters may share an arena, but they should not feel as though they are using the same rhythm, range or personality. A production trying to preserve those differences has to consider more than isolated finishing moves. It needs to think about the character of the action itself.

“Signature style” can cover several overlapping ideas: a character’s preferred attacks, their body language, the pace at which they engage, and the visual shapes they make while fighting. The information available does not identify which specific moves or techniques will appear in the movie. Still, the reported research points to an effort to treat the game roster as a collection of distinct martial identities rather than a group of familiar faces given generic action scenes.

For viewers, that is likely to be one of the most practical measures of the adaptation’s relationship with the games. References can be fun, but a character’s style is what makes an action sequence read as that character. Chun-Li should look like Chun-Li in motion; the same principle applies to Ken and the rest of the lineup.

From arcade memory to the cinema screen

Street Fighter carries a particular kind of nostalgic expectation because its appeal has been shaped by face-to-face competition as much as by its characters. The film is trying to evoke the feeling players associated with the arcade era while presenting that material in a modern live-action format.

That is a different task from simply retelling a story. Fighting games often communicate their biggest ideas through repetition and player control: opponents circle each other, establish distance, commit to an attack and react in a split second. Cinema cannot hand the audience a controller, so it must find other ways to make those personalities and decisions legible.

Actors who learn the physical grammar of their characters can help bridge that gap. Liang’s comments indicate she has attempted to do precisely that with Chun-Li, combining body transformation with research into the character’s movements. Whether the finished scenes land will ultimately depend on the film itself, including choreography, staging and editing, but the preparation described is closely aligned with the part of Chun-Li that fans know best: how she fights.

The broader adaptation conversation is also part of a busy pop-culture landscape, where performers and major franchises increasingly intersect; see, for instance, this look at comments on Tom Holland’s movie-star status. What separates this Street Fighter story is its emphasis on game literacy alongside conventional action-film conditioning.

What is known ahead of release

Callina Liang plays Chun-Li in the live-action Street Fighter adaptation.
Liang says she studied Chun-Li’s moves throughout the character’s gaming history.
She has described an intensive eating schedule, including 12 eggs a day and meals every two hours, during preparation.
Liang says her thighs increased by more than 6.5 centimetres before filming.
Noah Centineo has said Jon Valera researched every character’s signature fighting style from the Capcom games.
Street Fighter is scheduled to arrive in cinemas on October 16.

The exact execution of the movie’s game references remains to be seen, and no claim about the final action scenes can be made before audiences see them. But Liang’s preparation offers a specific early indication of the priorities behind her Chun-Li: physical credibility, movement accuracy and respect for a character whose fans have spent years recognizing her at a glance—and, more importantly, at a kick.