Mar 4, 2018
She was the sexy model on the Playboy cover in June 2005, holding a lightsaber while wearing just a few skinny leather straps around her naked body.
More than a decade after the racy photo, China-born American Bai Ling still prefers to wear as little as possible.
‘I like being sexy. When I am home, I am always naked,’ said the eccentric actress to MailOnline.
‘A female has to be sexy because that’s our romance. Otherwise you are very boring and dry, you don’t correctly present female elements.’
‘I was the first Asian actress ever to be on the Playboy magazine. That’s something I’m very proud of,’ said Bai Ling.
Once a Communist soldier in the far-flung Tibet who was sexually abused by Chinese generals, straightforward Ms Bai said being an oriental pin-up girl to millions of Western men has been an awakening experience to her.
‘I was the first Asian actress ever to be on the Playboy magazine. That’s something I’m very proud of,’ said Ms Bai.
‘I think Asian women are most sensual, most receptive and most mysterious to a lot of men.
‘My Playboy cover was almost like a declaration of that.’
But the actress, who has 33,300 followers on Instagram and more than 1.8 million followers on Chinese Weibo , insisted that she is different from other Playboy ‘bimbos’ such as Pamela Anderson, because she is intelligent.
‘I’m on the cover of Playboy magazine. I am also on the jury of the Berlin Film Festival and many other festivals. I can be sexy and intelligent.’
While being extremely open about her sexy image, Ms Bai likes keeping her age a mystery. Various internet claims suggest the youthful actress was born in 1961 or 1966, but she said ‘if you ask me, I’m 26’.
She added: ‘I feel I’m from the moon, and I adopted the form of a human being for this life time.
‘I really feel I’m an alien.’
Ms Bai thinks Asian women are ‘most sensual, most receptive and most mysterious’ to men and it has been her pleasure to represent the image of beautiful Asian women in Hollywood
Ms Bai grew up in the Chinese city of Chengdu under the hard-core Communist regime. Her father taught composition music and her mother taught comparative literature.
She spent her childhood learning to play Chinese instrument pipa and her teenage years serving the People’s Liberation Army as an entertainment soldier.
In 1990s, Ms Bai who was already a young actress in China moved to New York to study acting. She got her first major role in the 1997 film Red Corner, starring opposite Richard Gere.
When Hugh Hefner, the late founder of Playboy, approached her with the cover girl offer, Ms Bai said she firmly declined for three months.
Having been brought up in a repressive culture, she had thought Playboy was nothing but ‘porno’.
‘I said ‘no, no, no, no, I’m not going to do it. If I do it, it’s not going to be good for my people,’ Ms Bai said. ‘But they kept chasing me and offering me money.’
She recalled before she finally said ‘yes’ to Mr Hefner, she had to go into a book store to find out what Playboy was.
‘I had to make sure nobody was looking at me when I held the magazine,’ she said. ‘And when I opened it, I was like ‘oh my god, it’s nude’.
‘I was like a child getting into a forbidden place, looking at all these bodies.’
From China to Hollywood: Ms Bai grew up in Chengdu, and moved to the United States in 1990s to study acting. The picture on the right shows her as a young actress in China
The Playboy shoot turned out to be a life-changing experience for Ms Bai.
‘The process made me respect myself as a woman, and worship and admire my body,’ she said.
Ms Bai’s Playboy style was originally a nod to her role in Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith.
But her scenes were later cut out from the final version by George Lucas, who reportedly said the decision had nothing to do with Ms Bai’s Playboy cover.
Nevertheless, Ms Bai said both experience was a great recognition of her as an actress.
She insisted she is different from all the other American-Chinese actors or actresses because ‘they were born here, they were American, they only look Asian’.
‘While I came from a Communist country without knowing anyone or speak English.’
She said when she first started looking for acting opportunities in New York, she once went to the wrong audition venue on Barry Street instead of Broadway because ‘they sounded the same to me’.
‘When I arrived in Barry Street, a Spanish woman opened the door and told me to ‘get the f*** out of here’.’
She also recalled having to ask her fellow actors on Broadway to slow down whenever it was her cue because ‘otherwise I wouldn’t know when to talk’, said Ms Bai with her now fluent English.
