Who Is Jessie Mei Li? Here's What You Need to Know About the Shadow and Bone Star

Jessie Mei Li is an English actor, and she was born in Brighton in 1995. She grew up in Redhill in Surrey and went on to attend Reigate College before attending university. Since dropping out, Li has gone on to pursue a career in acting that's led her to joining the cast of Shadow and Bone, playing Alina Starkov.

After leaving university, Li began to spend her days teaching special needs children. In a roundtable interview, the actor told POPSUGAR that she'd been well aware of the Shadow and Bone franchise before joining the cast, thanks to her students. "Before becoming an actor, I dropped out of university, and I was working as a teaching assistant in a secondary school. This was the age group that Shadow and Bone is very popular with, and I remember lots of my students reading the books."

During her acting (and teaching) career, Li joined the National Youth Theatre in 2015, before beginning to train part-time with Identity School of Acting in 2016 for a year. Li initially began studying languages at university, but dropped out to pursue her love of acting.

Fun fact: Helen Mirren, Rosamund Pike, and Daniel Craig also attended NYT in the past!

Li is set to play the character of Lara Chung in Edgar Wright's upcoming psychological thriller, Last Night in Soho. She'll be starring alongside The Queen's Gambit's Anya Taylor-Joy, Matt Smith, and Diana Rigg (who died in September 2020, shortly after filming).

The film was initially set to air earlier this year, but Wright recently confirmed that as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, the release date has been pushed back to October.

Li recently shared a post on her Instagram reflecting on Neurodiversity day. The actor explained that she was diagnosed with ADHD at age 24, and that the diagnosis "answered many life long questions, and I feel like I'm finally understanding myself".

She also recently spoke about her experience in an interview with The Guardian, explaining that "[the diagnosis] completely changed how I viewed loads of things in my life, and made me really reconsider the way I think about things. In the past I was constantly late for things and forgetting things and losing things, and I remember as a teenager, my mum being like, 'Oh, you just need to be more careful.' And I'm like, 'I am really careful'. I felt like no one believed me ever. People, especially people who've just been diagnosed, go through a grieving period for who they were before. I'd love to be someone they can look at and say, 'OK, that person has been through that as well.'"