[IMG:L]Having a successful film career is not all it’s cracked up to be. In Cashmere Mafia, Lucy Liu leads a group of four friends working their way up the corporate ladder. They support each other through relationship hardships and hard days at the office as only girlfriends can. If they can’t have it all, at least they have each other. A successful Hollywood mogul herself, Liu can relate to her character Mia Mason. Liu herself broke down the similarities and differences between Lucy and Mia.
1. The cashmere mafia dines out. Lucy and her friends stay in.
“We actually get together a lot and we eat. We sit down, we eat, we make food, we talk. I do cook, but the thing about food is the process of making it and enjoying that, that’s what’s wonderful. Because you have to eat at some point and you’re so busy with your schedule, that’s when you sit down and you catch up on everything.”
[IMG:R]2. Mia dates a hotshot yuppie. Lucy takes all kinds.
” I’ve dated people in the finance world before. To me, it’s not about what they do. I really am into somebody’s sense of humor and their ability to laugh at themselves. Life really can’t be that serious. I’ve been on a lot of Unicef trips and I find that you have to take a look at life in a very separate way. I think that’s something I appreciate more and more as time goes on.”
3. Mia wants a career and family. Lucy isn’t so generic.
“It’s an individual choice and for me, I’ve never thought my dream has been to get married and have a white picket fence and the 2.5 children. For me, it’s just been about living my dream. My parents are from China. I’m first generation, so for us it was just about survival and maintaining, being alive and going to school. It was mainly education. And the idea of going into anything artistic was outrageous. So for me to be in this industry, that’s having it all.”
[IMG:L]4. Guys are intimidated by Mia’s success. Lucy’s success has opened her world.
“It sounds really strange but I think that if I had become an accountant or something like that, I would have still been able to donate and contribute to Unicef or to other humanitarian efforts. Now I can actually go to these countries and have military escorts to go in and see impoverished areas and be able to make a difference. If I show up on Oprah and have a conversation with her, it can [lead people to] donate $2.5 million to an Earthquake situation. That to me is what’s impactful and important.”
5. The cashmere mafia have been best friends for ages. Lucy met her costars just before shooting.
“I just feel that’s definitely something that comes easy because you go on a set and suddenly this is your husband or this is your boyfriend. So being with women is much easier. I don’t know how it comes up but we just naturally start talking. We had interviews earlier and everyone was talking on top of each other. I don’t know if anyone was getting information out of us because we were literally talking on top of each other, not to compete but just because we were all answering the same question and agreeing with one another. I don’t know what it is but it’s a natural chemistry that women have.”
[IMG:R]6. Mia dresses in stylish threads. So does Lucy.
“Patricia Field is somebody that we were lucky enough to have come onto our show. She has an incredible talent for putting together pieces and making them look like art. She never repeats an outfit, as she said in my fitting, and she also puts together things that you would never imagine. I mean, she could take something from the ‘80s, put a modern belt on it and put some shows with a purse from the ‘70s and it looks great. She also goes with what she thinks the actors are like and what she’s seen of our work and how we move and how we like to illuminate the screen. So she sort of puts that in conjunction with what we are working on to create a new look. Because she also did Sex and the City, she knows what not to repeat. If anything, she’s going to want to start something completely new because that’s who she is. She doesn’t even like to repeat her own work.”
7: Lucy mixes designers, therefore Mia now does too.
“For me, I like to mix for myself things that are high end with low end. Like you can get something from Fendi and mix it with H&M and make it look fabulous. That’s something that we are doing. We went to Bergdorf’s and had a fitting there for three hours. Then we went to the Lower East Side and went to a secondhand store. That’s how we found things from the ‘80s that no one would ever probably wear and that’s going to be something that you are going to see. I think that it makes it more unique not to just have something that’s right off the rack.”
