6 essential Jing Boran dramas and films to watch after ‘The Early Spring’

Jing first came to public attention in 2007 as the national champion of male singing competition Jiayou! Haonaner, initially making a name for himself as a singer before turning to acting. In 2010, he appeared opposite Angelababy in romantic film Hot Summer Days, earning a best new performer nomination at the 30th Hong Kong Film Awards. The following decade saw him build a solid big-screen profile with titles including Up in the Wind (2013), The Lost Tomb (2016), Us and Them (2018), and Hong Kong director Raman Hui’s Monster Hunt franchise, before gradually shifting his focus to streaming drama from 2020 onwards.

Here are some of Jing’s finest lead performances to add to your watch list after The Early Spring.

This love-filled comedy brought together actors from mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan across a series of interwoven romantic vignettes. Jing plays Xiao Fang, an unassuming small-town lad working in a cold drinks shop, who wagers with his boss that he can win the heart of a factory girl—played by Angelababy—within a hundred days. The role earned him a best new performer nomination at the 30th Hong Kong Film Awards. The following year, the pair reunited for the sequel Love in Space, bringing the same chemistry to a new story.

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Teaming up with Angelababy once again, Jing plays a college couple whose romance begins inside the wildly popular online game Dreams of Jianghu—only for the two to discover they are classmates in real life.The film cuts between the game world and campus life as their relationship grows in both.

The directorial debut of singer-songwriter Renée Liu, this film sees Jing play a young northerner who heads to Beijing in pursuit of a career in game design. On a packed New Year train, he meets Fang Xiaoxiao—played by Zhou Dongyu—and what follows is a decade of first love, separation and reunion. The film later inspired a Korean remake, Once We Were Us, directed by Kim Do-young—the filmmaker behind the box office hit Kim Ji-young, Born 1982.

Inspired by true stories, Lost and Love takes on the harrowing subject of child trafficking in China. Jing plays a young mechanic who was abducted at the age of four, with Andy Lau as a father who has spent fifteen years criss-crossing the country by motorbike in search of his missing son. Grossing over 200 million yuan in its first ten days of release, the film played an important role in drawing public attention to the rising issue of child abduction. In real life, the man behind Lau’s character—Guo Gangtang—was finally reunited with his son in 2021, twenty-four years after the boy was taken.

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In the Monster Hunt franchise, Jing plays Song Tianyin—a man born into a demon-hunting family who unexpectedly falls pregnant with the demon king’s heir; he finds himself on the run alongside demon hunter Huo Xiaolan—played by Bai Baihe—to protect the child.

A departure from his more masculine roles, Jing leans into the role’s gender-defying warmth as an anxious, fiercely devoted parent—earning him a best actor nomination at the 33rd Hundred Flowers Awards and making him the first actor of his generation to be recognised in the category. The sequel, Monster Hunt 2, followed in early 2018.

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