Zanilia Zhao is Dissatisfied With “The Legend of Fei’s” Script?

The actress’s social post hints of her displeasure with major edits to the script.

Since filming 2015’s The Journey of Flower <花千骨>, Zanilia Zhao (赵丽颖) shot to fame and  became a ratings queen with almost every production being well-received. Marrying William Feng (馮紹峰) last year, she has returned to the screens after giving birth to their child at the start of the year. Currently working on new drama The Legend of Fei <有翡> alongside Wang Yibo (王一博), Zanilia shared a social media post which was interpreted as mocking the script of The Legend of Fei. 

Work Studio Issues Clarification

Adapted from the novel Bandits <有匪>, the drama stars Zanilia as Zhou Fei and Wang Yibo as Xie Yun, two martial arts proponents who expose wulin secrets together. As filming for the drama is still undergoing, Zanilia’s post, which showed the contrast between one burger full of ingredients captioned “original work” and another burger which looked shrunken and underwhelming captioned “edited”, naturally lead many to guess if the actress was pointing to edits made to The Legend of Fei script.

Fans left comments beneath her post such as: “It means the essence is gone”; “This image is too true; the edited version is much watered down”; “It must be that someone made nasty edits to the script again” and so on.

With the comments provoking much discussion, Zanilia’s work studio then responded in an official Weibo statement, “Ms. Zanilia Zhao is part of the cast of The Legend of Fei where she plays the character Zhou Fei; the team and the actress love and respect this project. Throughout the filming process, she has been serious and professional and is working towards the same goal as The Legend of Fei team. We sincerely hope to deliver an outstanding work at the end so as not to disappoint everyone’s efforts and anticipation.”

An Industry Trend

Not the first time major edits and deletes, including the addition of supporting characters have been made to dramatic scripts, this also happened in The Untamed <陈情令> which aired to popularity earlier. The original novel only had two male leads, but the drama version saw the addition of a new character Wen Qing, played by actress Meng Ziyi (孟子義), who had so many scenes she became a female lead. After news leaked, protests from supporters of the original novel who threatened to boycott the show led production to edit the script, but Meng Ziyi’s scenes still took up much screen time.

Source: Yahoo HK

This article is written by JoyceK for JayneStars.com.