Song Weilong

Song Weilong never planned to become an actor when he entered the Shaolin Temple at nine to learn martial arts. That physical discipline ended up being his calling card on social media before talent scouts from China's entertainment industry put a contract on the table. In 2015 he signed with Huanyu Film, and his face started circulating in offices across Beijing.

It wasn't a carefully considered decision.

His first notable appearance came on the variety show Run for Time in 2015. But the real interest from production companies came from his height and a physical look that fit the standard of modern romantic dramas. In 2017 he filmed Long For You, and the ratings confirmed that young audiences responded to his on-screen presence.

The rise to billions of views

The year 2020 marked a shift in the scale of his projects with the release of Find Yourself. In this series he played a young man who falls for an older woman, and the chemistry between the leads drove massive ratings spikes on Mango TV. The age-gap romance genre was booming in China at the time.

Shortly after, Go Ahead arrived in 2020. This production moved away from conventional romance to focus on the family bonds of three young people with no blood ties. The series racked up more than five billion views and put Song at the center of conversations about the new generation of actors born in the late nineties.

The Chinese market doesn't forgive absence.

Despite his strong numbers, legal disputes with his agency slowed his work pace for a while. Song Weilong took Huanyu Film to court in 2022 over contract disagreements that limited his public appearances. He spent months focusing on modeling for international luxury brands while the loose ends of his creative freedom were being resolved.

The Shaolin Legacy and the Price of the Era

In 2023 he returned to work with the release of A League of Nobleman. It's a mystery drama set in the Tang Dynasty in which he plays an orphan with a brilliant gift for deduction. Filming was difficult, however, due to censorship restrictions that affected detective-themed dramas during that production period.

His martial arts skills let him film action scenes without constantly needing stunt doubles. In 2024 he appeared in the movie Seven Ventured Back, directed by Cao Baoping. The project aims for a rawer, more realistic look, away from the beauty filters common in his previous TV work.

And the gamble paid off.

He's set to release The First Frost in 2025. It's an adaptation of a hugely popular web novel in which he plays Sang Yan, a character with a very demanding fan base on online forums. The series was shot mainly on urban locations in Chongqing, with a post-production budget that exceeds the usual standards of the Youku platform.

Principal photography for The First Frost wrapped in June 2024 with a crew of more than two hundred people.