Inside the World-Conquering Rise of the Micro-Drama

The regretful colonel in “Silent Ex-Wife” is played by Ben Whalen, a thirty-eight-year-old actor from New York. In the fall of 2023, after spending years struggling to land consistent work, Whalen began noticing jobs on the casting platform Actors Access for something called vertical shorts. “I just kept seeing it, so I decided, Let me check this out,” Whalen told me. In the past two years, he has acted in more than thirty micro-dramas. “It’s made my life so much better,” he said. “I have some security, financially. I have a fun project to work on every few weeks. And I get to meet so many cool people and travel the world.” When I checked Actors Access in February, roughly a third of the listings were for micro-dramas. “It’s created this middle class for actors and crew members,” Whalen told me.

Heath Adam Cates, an actor from New Mexico, was on the Xi’an shoot with my German friend. “This is the first time in twenty years that I’ve legit been able to do acting as a career,” Cates told me. He described micro-dramas as a refuge from a Hollywood roiled by streaming. After a vertical shoot last November, Cates went home for Thanksgiving, where he noticed something familiar emanating from a family friend’s phone. “The fact that there’s a seventy-year-old man sitting at a kitchen table on Thanksgiving watching a micro-drama—that’s a pretty big deal,” Cates told me.

The set of “Silent Ex-Wife” teemed with the controlled chaos of any film shoot, with a few additional quirks. Nearly all the instructions were relayed electronically from the director’s cave and translated by a bilingual assistant director. (The A.D. “must be someone who’s studied overseas,” Vivian told me.) Because the cameras were vertical, actors huddled closer together, and the crew paid extra attention to upper-body details like hair and makeup. Chinese audiences prefer flat, even lighting, like that of a smartphone beauty filter, Vivian told me. But for “Silent Ex-Wife” they had opted for what they described as the style of American TV, lighting the side of the actors’ faces so that the rest fell into shadow. At one point, the crew shot a scene in which Whalen’s character joins a bar fight, shouting invectives at a hapless extra before pummelling him to the ground. Suddenly, the director yelled “Cut.” Then he burst out of his cave, plopped himself next to the extra, and said, “Watch me, like this!” The director hurled himself to the floor. This note didn’t need a translation.

Watching the set, I was sometimes reminded of “American Factory,” a 2019 documentary about a Chinese glass-manufacturing company that took over a plant in suburban Ohio, and the friction that ensued between its demanding, productivity-fixated managers and the union culture of working-class America. In Hengdian, I found work hours to be a common complaint among foreign actors. Another challenge was adjusting to expectations for onscreen intimacy, a staple of vertical dramas. In the U.S., actors’ guilds push for a dedicated intimacy coördinator, who helps choreograph the scene and supervise the filming. There is no equivalent on Chinese sets, where directors have been known to demonstrate the blocking themselves. (Vivian told me her industry now hires intimacy coördinators for overseas productions.)

Micro-drama actors can be further disoriented by the scripts themselves. “Silent Ex-Wife” draws from a popular genre of Chinese web fiction called houhuiliu, or “regret flow”: a man mistreats his wife, only to repent when her concealed social status or fortune is revealed. At the end of regret-flow plotlines, husbands tend to beg their wives for forgiveness by dropping to their knees. This act of contrition is legible in East Asia, but slightly awkward when performed by Western actors. “I don’t know if they think that’s an American thing, but it doesn’t happen in the world I know of,” Whalen told me. Whenever he plays a wealthy male lead, Chinese producers dress him up in extravagant suits and jewelry, even though, in Whalen’s view, American billionaires are just as likely to wear T-shirts.

“It’s almost a Chinese lens on American life, based on American TV they’ve seen,” Jen Cooper, a critic and the founder of Vertical Drama Love, a website dedicated to micro-dramas, told me. “It’s this strange reflection back.” Whalen said that he often tweaks a line so that it lands more naturally in English. But he was wary of questioning the underlying logic of the scripts, which tech platforms had provided and optimized for maximum engagement. The cultural missteps, he thought, might even be part of the draw, an incidental source of the form’s campy, surreal humor.