Simu Liu’s name gets butchered during Los Angeles Clippers game announcement
By William Yuk
While celebrity shout-outs are a sporting event staple, Simu Liu’s moment in the spotlight was botched by a butchered pronunciation of his name.
On Sunday, the Los Angeles Clippers shared a clip on Twitter from their match against the New Orleans Pelicans depicting the awkward exchange between Liu and the Crypto.com arena’s hype man on Twitter.
The hype man’s announcement starts off well, introducing Liu as “Marvel’s first ever superhero,” as Liu flashes his Clippers hat, but quickly goes downhill when the announcer stumbles with the “i” in Liu’s first name and drops the “i” in his last name altogether.
In the clip, the master of ceremonies booms, “Sih-mee Loo!” Upon hearing the mispronunciation, Liu pauses before shrugging off the remark and nodding with a puzzled look on his face.
The actor has previously spoken about struggles with pronouncing his name, pointing out in a Twitter post that teleprompters in award ceremonies use phonetic spellings of his name like “See-moo Lee-you” to prevent mistakes like the one made during the Clippers game.
Liu has also revealed that the gap between Asian names and English pronunciations was a source of insecurity when he was young, admitting that he “would’ve given anything to change [his] name to something a little bit more Anglicized.”
In time, Liu would find peace with his unconventional name, even using his role in “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” as a vehicle to poke fun at the phonetic disconnects between Eastern names and Western languages. In a scene shared with Awkwafina’s character Katy Chen, Liu points out the subtle difference between his character’s Americanized name Sean and his original name Shang.
Featured Image via @LAClippers
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