The Shanghai International Film Festival is a showcase for the best in world cinema, though for Chloe Bennet the event took on a deeper meaning. As one of the stars of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Bennet is best known to American audiences as the gutsy superhero Quake, but long before her big break she was a teenager growing up in China’s biggest city. Originally Born in Chicago, Bennet moved to Shanghai at the age of 15 to pursue a career in entertainment. Bennet remembers the ups and downs of those formative years vividly. “I wanted to act, I wanted to sing, and man I ran around this city with so much excitement, confidence and hope of what I was going to do with my life and my career,” said the 27-year-old actress via email from Los Angeles. “I didn’t have my family with me, I didn’t have friends, I just had the dream of what could be.”
At the festival to represent her latest project Abominable, the DreamWorks animated drama about a young girl who reunites a yeti with its magical family, Bennet returned to the city in high spirits. The first Hollywood children’s film to have an Asian lead since Mulan in 1998, Abominable is set to break barriers when it’s released in September. Now on screen acting, singing, and giving kids a new heroine to look up to, she stepped onto the red carpet at Shanghai Grand Theatre in her glittering Vivienne Westwood gown with the heartwarming feeling that she’d come full circle. “Man, I’ve got to say, it’s been over a decade since I lived here, and every time I’m back the city makes me feel like that same little girl,” she said. “I love that feeling [and] I love this city.”
