"Rain hammered the stunt wires in Hengdian. Lu Xingchen hung from a crane thirty meters above the ground, his stand-in costume soaked to a dark gray.
The director shouted through a megaphone, 'Take a harder fall!' He looked down and saw a girl holding an umbrella below. Zhang Ruonan clutched a script, raindrops clinging to the tips of her hair. When she looked up, her gaze was a star piercing the storm clouds.
That day, he broke his left knee taking a fall for the lead actor, but found her misplaced continuity notebook in the hospital corridor.
On its yellowed pages, she had written: 'Extras aren't some ragtag bunch. They're stars that haven't started shining yet.'
Only later did he learn that this actress, who had been told she was 'too stubborn to do a convincing crying scene' while filming Cry Me a Sad River, would stay up late helping him rehearse his lines when he got his first script as a male lead. When haters called him 'an extra who doesn't belong onstage,' she'd stand outside the set holding a light-up sign and say, 'The stars I've waited for have never needed anyone's permission to shine.'
From a Hengdian shack to the red carpet at an awards ceremony, theirs was a story of two people who refused to bow to fate, becoming each other's spotlight."
