Hidden Love star Victor Ma planned to get fired from the show, recalls being ‘unanimously hated’: ‘Why me?’

Some actors spend years chasing the part that changes everything. Victor Ma spent the run-up to his trying to get out of it.

Sitting down with Beyond All Blue, Ma speaks openly about the drama that redefined his career, and about how close he came to never making it. When the call about the 2023 hit, Hidden Love arrived, he was not in a celebrating mood.

"I was in a very, very dark time in my life," he says. In the series, Ma played the role of Sang Yan, the elder brother to the protagonist, Sang Zhi. The show revolved around Sang Zhi's secret love for Sang Yan's best friend, Duan Jiaxu.

An offer that made no sense

The news came casually. "They gave us calls like yo, the producer thinks you're a really good fit," Ma recalls. His reaction was disbelief, not excitement.

"I was so confused because I was like how out of everyone why me," he says. The character, in his view, set an impossibly high bar: "he's not even human being he's a deity. He's literally the perfect guy."

He is blunt about why he didn't see himself in the role. "I'm not going to lie. Like I'm not the best-looking guy," he says. "You know how many good-looking actors there are in China? They feel different."

The question he kept returning to was simple: "Why did you come to me?"

The plan to get sent home

Ma did fly out to the shoot. But he arrived with a strategy that most actors would never admit to.

"You know what my plan was I'm going be so unprofessional I'm going to have the director hate me," he says. He imagined the director sending him home: "she's going to tell me to fly back tonight. Yeah, I don't have to like do this right? That's my original plan."

A year of being torn apart online

Part of his reluctance came from a backlash that started before filming did. "Rumours online was saying that I was there and I was unanimously hated," Ma says.

The criticism went well beyond his casting. People were "trash talking like threatening my family telling me that I'm not good enough and like this for an entire year," he says.

It pushed him to the edge of quitting. "There were times like I was literally I was calling my parents," he says. "I was like, if this actually fail, I'm just going to quit."

The turning point was not a pep talk. It was an honest admission from his director.

"So the director said she's like you're not my first pick," Ma recalls. "But I would like to dabble and gamble with you when you play in this role."

That candour won him over. The actor who had planned to get himself sent home decided to commit.

"Actually, I changed my mind if you're going to dabble let's do it," he says. "I'm with you. I'm on your side. Let's do it."

The flip

What came next was the reversal he had barely dared to hope for. After a year of being written off before anyone had seen a single scene, the drama's release changed the conversation almost immediately.

"When it came out, it was it just the entire just flip," Ma says. "Like everyone overnight was just like, yeah. No, I have to admit like yeah, he's good."

He sums up how his loudest critics reacted in a single sound: "They were like, hmm."

For an actor who once wondered why anyone would choose him, the answer arrived on screen. The director's gamble, the one he almost talked himself out of, ended up as the role that won over the people most determined to doubt him.