VIDEO EXCLUSIVE: Poppy Liu On Working With Rachel Weisz On ‘Dead Ringers,’ Her ‘Freak Weirdo’ Character

The new Prime Video psychological thriller Dead Ringers follows Manhattan-based gynecologists, who are on a mission to change the way women give birth and perform questionable procedures on infertile women – and happen to identical twins.

Series costar Poppy Liu spoke with uInterview founder Erik Meers in an exclusive interview about her role in Dead Ringers, where she discussed the show’s premise as well as what it was like to work with Academy Award-winning actress Rachel Weisz.

When asked about her character, Greta, and her relationship with her, Liu described having “a lot of love for her.”

“She’s just such a weird strange little freaky weirdo,” she said. “She’s like a loner, could-be-genius, could-be-serial-killer. Very deep unsolved mother issues. Probably needs therapy but does this instead. So, I mean, she’s fascinating to play, she’s the best kind of character to play, which is just strange, many-layered, complex – a bit of a Rubik’s cube.”

Liu recalled what it was like while filming Dead Ringers, saying that as “dark and moody the show is I think on set there’s actually a lot of levity and joy.”

The actress gushed about working with Weisz, whom she described as being “so dreamy to work with.”

“As a scene partner you feel really taken care of by her,” Liu explained before recalling one of her first times on set with Weisz. “I don’t remember what it was, but it was just like so much giggling and we’re just running around, and like I remember [Sean Durkin] was directing that one and we had a take where we were just like giggling the whole time and running about.”

Liu explained that while Durkin appreciated the joyous nature of the scene, he asked them to do the take again “but a little less like toddlers.”

“There’s just a lot of sense of play in it and I think you actually can feel that in the series,” she said. “There is like a buoyance that balances out like kinda how heavy it can get also. I think [Weisz] is a really funny actor. There’s a lot of humor to everything.”

In addition to acting, Liu is also a full-spectrum doula and is a board member of SisterSong, a justice collective dedicated to reproductive justice for women of color. When asked whether her role as a doula played a role in the show, Liu said that while she did not feel like she was going to “talk someone through labor right now or make a birth plan,” she believes the show touches on important topics about birth that are “quite brave.”

Dead Ringers explores “racial discrepancies in birth and sort of the ugly history that this country has around like forced sterilization and like people not having autonomy over their bodies,” Liu said.

“It goes into some heavy places but as much as the show itself borders on like body horror at times, some of the reality of this is not body horror, it’s just what the world is,” she added.

She believes there is “nothing else that exists out there that shows birth as head-on as [Dead Ringers] does.”

Liu explained that the show has “wrapped” topics about birth in “such a sexy, dark, strange, confusing, psychologically tormenting and magnificent world” that viewers are left and saturated with “visuals and information and afterwards realize like ‘oh I think I just saw more people give birth in this one episode that I have in my entire life of  consuming media.”

Dead Ringers dominated the Cannes International Series festival on Saturday, with the audience breaking into spontaneous applause after the first scene. The limited series is set to premiere on Vido Prime’s streaming platform on April 21.