Callina Liang has a pretty good excuse for never wanting to see another egg again. The actress is playing Chun-Li in Legendary’s upcoming Street Fighter movie, and getting ready for one of gaming’s most famous fighters meant completely changing the way she trained and ate. Liang did not just learn Chun-Li’s kicks — she built the legs to throw them.

And by the time filming wrapped, that transformation had become impossible to miss.

Callina Liang knew there was one part of Chun-Li she could not fake. The character’s kicks are practically as famous as the fighter herself, which meant the actress needed the strength to make them look convincing on camera. So she spent two hours a day training in Taekwondo, Muay Thai and Wushu while also putting serious work into strengthening her legs. Then came the diet.

“When I was bulking, I ate 12 eggs a day. Every two hours I had to have a meal, and I was on the verge of throwing up. But it worked,” she told Empire.

And apparently, it really did. As she revealed to Empire, by the end of the shoot her thighs had grown six-and-a-half centimeters each. That is a pretty dramatic transformation for a character whose physicality is so closely tied to her identity. But Liang was not interested in looking like Chun-Li and calling it a day. She wanted to move like her, too. She downloaded every version of Street Fighter onto her PS5 and recorded Chun-Li’s fights in slow motion, studying the character’s movements on her phone so she could bring them into the movie as accurately as possible.

That attention to detail makes Liang’s preparation more than just another Hollywood transformation story. She was trying to understand what makes Chun-Li Chun-Li — from the muscles behind those famous kicks to the way the character actually fights.

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And now, all that work is about to be put to the test when Street Fighter finally hits the big screen.

For all the work Callina Liang put into becoming Chun-Li, she is not walking into this movie alone. Street Fighter brings together a stacked lineup of fighters from across the video game franchise, with Chun-Li at the center of the story. Set in 1993, the movie follows estranged fighters Ryu and Ken Masters after Chun-Li recruits them for the World Warrior Tournament. What starts as a brutal tournament soon becomes something much bigger when a deadly conspiracy forces the two fighters to confront each other and their pasts.

That gives Liang a particularly important role in the movie, but she is surrounded by some seriously recognizable names. Andrew Koji plays Ryu, while Noah Centineo takes on Ken Masters. The rest of the roster includes Jason Momoa as Blanka, David Dastmalchian as M. Bison, Cody Rhodes as Guile, Roman Reigns as Akuma, 50 Cent as Balrog, Vidyut Jammwal as Dhalsim and Eric André as Don Sauvage.

With that much star power packed into one fighting game adaptation, there is plenty riding on Street Fighter to finally deliver the kind of big-screen spectacle the franchise deserves. Directed by Kitao Sakurai, the movie is scheduled to hit theaters on October 16, 2026, giving audiences their next chance to see Liang put all those months of training — and apparently all those eggs — to work.

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Do you think this kind of commitment is what a Street Fighter adaptation needs to finally get its iconic fighters right? Let us know in the comments!