To me, the recipe for a perfect friendship involves three things: a person you can laugh with, somebody who has a shared admiration for Taylor Swift, and, of course, a person with a Hunger Games obsession as big as yours. Not everyone has these three qualities, but The Hunger Games: The Ballad Of Songbirds & Snakes star Ashley Liao sure does.
Liao recently got to live out her dream of joining The Hunger Games universe as Clemensia Dovecote in the latest installment of the franchise. “I got indoctrinated [to The Hunger Games world] very early in middle school, got my combat boots on, cried to “Safe & Sound” by Taylor Swift (feat. The Civil Wars), and had the side-braid going,” Liao says in an exclusive interview with Her Campus.
Filming The Hunger Games: The Ballad Of Songbirds & Snakes was an invaluable experience for Liao — especially getting to work alongside some of the best in the business, like Viola Davis and Peter Dinklage. “[Davis] would give advice on our days when it was just [Blyth] and her, and it was very intimate,” Liao says. “A very, very large film was made very personal.”
Of course, Liao also got to hang out with some other stars from the movie, like Rachel Zegler and Hunter Schafer. And yes, they are as nice as they seem. “They didn’t feel like these massive, incredibly successful movie stars or television stars. They were just my co-stars, and they were very sweet,” she says.
Liao is bright, bubbly, and incredibly kind, which, on the surface, may not seem similar to her character Clemensia Dovecote. However, the role of Clemensia allowed Liao to work on her confidence, and “in being secure as a 20-something Asian American woman in the world.” The role of Clemensia allowed Liao to work on her confidence on and off-set. “She knows what she wants and she goes after it, and she’s not afraid to be wrong and pay the consequences for that,” Liao says. “I got to take some of her confidence with me.” Prior to her Hunger Games role, Liao played Ever Wong in Paramount+’s Love in Taipei, a character she says is “very much like me.”
While filming Love in Taipei and The Hunger Games, Liao was a communications major at UCLA. Though it was difficult for Liao to balance her acting career with school, it wasn’t an impossible feat. “It got to a point where I was finishing out my fall quarter at UCLA and I was also filming Love in Taipei in Taiwan. So I woke up at 2 a.m. Taiwan time to take a final, went back to sleep, and then woke up at 5 in the morning for my call time. So was it hard? Yes. Was it impossible? Almost. But was it worth it? Absolutely.”
Looking back, Liao’s proud of herself for having maintained her acting career on top of her studies, especially since “education has been really important” to her. “I always knew I wanted to go to college. When I was working on Fuller House, I’d always think, ‘I’m paying for college. I’m going to go to college.’ So I’m really thankful that it happened, and I got to do both.”
Liao has accomplished a lot at just 22 years old, and it seems like she has no plans of slowing down anytime soon. And why would she? Over the last few years, she’s gotten to work on some incredible projects and travel around the world. Liao’s also had the opportunity to work alongside actors like Tom Blyth (Coriolanus Snow in Songbirds & Snakes), Michael Campion (Jackson Fuller in Fuller House), and Ross Butler (Rick Woo in Love in Taipei), whose characters she chose the fates of in a game of Kiss, Marry, Kill. “We’re going to have to kiss Rick Woo. We’re going to have to kill Coriolanus Snow — unless he’s got that long hair in that final shot. Then that’s marry,” Liao says. “I guess we’re going to have to marry Michael Campion.” When she’s right, she’s right.
The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes is available now on digital and February 13 on 4K, Blu-ray and DVD!