Callina Liang Reveals Grueling Training Regimen to Become Chun-Li in ‘Street Fighter’ – Check out the Video

Video game adaptations live and die on how convincingly their cast can embody characters fans have spent decades memorizing down to the smallest visual detail. For Capcom’s beloved fighting franchise, few characters carry as much iconic weight as Chun-Li, whose lightning-fast kicks and famously powerful legs have defined her design since her 1991 debut.

That kind of legacy puts enormous pressure on whoever steps into the role for Legendary’s upcoming live-action reboot, especially given how much of Chun-Li’s identity is tied directly to her physicality rather than just her personality or backstory. For rising star Callina Liang, landing the part meant confronting that challenge head-on almost immediately after being cast.

Liang has now revealed just how far she went to physically transform for the role, undergoing months of martial arts training and a demanding diet regimen that reportedly added six and a half centimeters to each of her thighs. That transformation became central to how convincingly she could recreate Chun-Li’s signature kick-based fighting style on screen.

Liang described her preparation process in blunt terms, explaining that she trained for two hours daily while dramatically overhauling her diet and building up her leg strength, saying she strengthened her legs a lot and changed her diet drastically, in comments reported by ScreenRant. Her training regimen combined Taekwondo, Muay Thai, and wushu, giving her a broad martial arts foundation to draw from when recreating Chun-Li’s specific moveset.

Beyond the physical transformation, Liang took an unusually meticulous approach to studying the character’s actual in-game movements. She downloaded every version of “Street Fighter” onto a PlayStation 5 and recorded Chun-Li’s fights in slow motion on her phone, allowing her to repeatedly study and replicate the character’s signature kicks with as much accuracy as possible.

That dedication to authenticity extended even to her eating habits during the bulking phase of her training, where she reportedly consumed up to a dozen eggs a day as part of her strength-building diet. The transformation proved dramatic enough that it became visibly apparent by the time filming wrapped, a notable achievement given Liang’s relatively limited screen résumé heading into the project.

Liang’s ambitions for taking on physically demanding roles predate her casting as Chun-Li by at least a year. In an earlier profile, she expressed a desire to play a John Wick-style character, saying she wanted to ride a horse, shoot some guns and kick ass, a sentiment she shared in comments reported by Screen Realm, a wish that ended up finding an unexpectedly fitting outlet once she landed the role.

Set in 1993, “Street Fighter” follows Ryu and Ken Masters, played by Andrew Koji and Noah Centineo respectively, as Liang’s Chun-Li recruits them to compete in the World Warrior Tournament. What begins as a straightforward fighting competition eventually spirals into something far more dangerous, forcing the estranged fighters to confront both a deadly conspiracy and their own pasts.

The film boasts a genuinely stacked supporting cast, including Jason Momoa as Blanka, David Dastmalchian as M. Bison, Cody Rhodes as Guile, Roman Reigns as Akuma, and 50 Cent as Balrog, alongside Vidyut Jammwal as Dhalsim and Eric André as Dan Sauvage. Liang had only around three months between being cast and stepping in front of cameras, giving her preparation timeline an especially compressed and demanding turnaround.

With “Street Fighter” set to hit theaters on October 16, Liang’s transformation into Chun-Li stands as one of the more physically committed performances heading into the film’s release. Given how closely fans of the games scrutinize adaptations of characters this iconic, her willingness to go to such lengths could prove to be exactly what sets this reboot apart from past attempts to bring the franchise to the big screen.

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