Olivia Cheng

Olivia Cheng is a Canadian actress, broadcast journalist, and former correspondent for Entertainment Tonight Canada. Some of her roles include concubine Mei Lin in Marco Polo, sinister Master Gao in Deadly Class, Ah Toy (a madam in San Francisco's Chinatown with a secret violent life) in the 1870s-set martial arts crime drama series Warrior, Dr. Sylvia Wen (Boulder Free Zone's main doctor) in the 2021 adaptation of Stephen King's The Stand and warrior Charlotte in the dystopian series See.

Early life Cheng was born in Edmonton, Alberta, to parents who immigrated from Guangdong. They were part of a co-founding group of Chinese parents that created the Edmonton Mandarin Bilingual program within the city's public school system. Her father worked in software and her mother was a health aide.

In 2007, Cheng portrayed Iris Chang in the documentary Iris Chang: The Rape of Nanking, based on Chang's best-selling 1997 book The Rape of Nanking.

Cheng has appeared in Supernatural and Eureka, as well as in the episode "The New World" of the television show The 4400. In 2013, she appeared as Linda Park in the TV series Arrow.

In 2014, Cheng landed a role in Netflix's series Marco Polo, a lavish television drama about Marco Polo's journey as he travels from his home in Venice to the court of Kublai Khan, where he finds himself in the middle of a war in 13th-century China. The show was one of the most expensive TV series ever produced. Cheng portrayed Mei Lin, a Song dynasty concubine and assassin, and the sister of Jia Sidao. In a December 2014 interview, Cheng joked that owing to her frequent nude scenes in Marco Polo, she would not be watching the series with her parents.

In October 2017, it was announced Cheng would be part of the main cast of the Justin Lin-produced Warrior, set against the backdrop of the Tong Wars of San Francisco. In the series Cheng portrays Ah Toy, a madam in San Francisco's Chinatown during the 1870s, which is a fictionalised version of the real Ah Toy. The series, based on an original idea by the late Bruce Lee, premiered on Cinemax on April 5, 2019.

Filmography