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DirectingA career guide · fact-checked July 2026
Lucy Liu is one of the most recognizable actors of her generation — but for more than a decade she has also been building a serious, and often overlooked, career behind the camera.
An actor who learned to direct
Liu has spoken about wanting to understand filmmaking from every seat on set, and she pursued directing deliberately rather than as a vanity credit. Working steadily through the 2010s, she turned herself into a director whom showrunners trusted with pivotal episodes of prestige and genre television — not a star dabbling, but a working episodic director with a growing body of work.
Elementary: directing where she starred
Liu's most sustained directing work came on CBS's Elementary, the modern Sherlock Holmes drama in which she played Dr. Joan Watson for seven seasons. She directed six episodes across the series' run, using the show she knew intimately as her training ground — a rare position that let her learn the craft on familiar material, with a cast and crew who already trusted her. Directing while also carrying a lead role is a genuine feat of scheduling and focus, and she did it repeatedly.
Luke Cage: a marquee assignment
In 2018 Liu directed the season 2 premiere of Marvel's Luke Cage for Netflix — a high-profile, effects-heavy episode of a major superhero series, and a notable vote of confidence in her ability to open a season and set its tone. Premieres are among the most demanding assignments a television director can draw, and handing one to Liu signaled that her directing was taken seriously well beyond the show she starred on.
Graceland, SVU, and steady episodic work
Alongside those, Liu directed episodes of USA's Graceland and NBC's long-running Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, the kind of workmanlike episodic credits that mark a director as reliable rather than occasional. Taken together, her directing résumé spans network procedural, cable drama, and streaming superhero television — a deliberately broad range.
Producing, too
Her authorship has increasingly extended to producing. She produced and starred in Rosemead (2025), the based-on-true-events drama that earned the strongest reviews of her career, and she executive produces the A24-produced Peacock series Superfakes, in which she also stars. She voices and produces the immersive project The Pirate Queen: No Safe Waters, which premiered in the Cannes Immersive Competition in 2026. The through-line is clear: Liu increasingly wants a hand in shaping the whole work, not just performing in it.
Why it matters
For an actor who spent the early part of her career fighting the narrow roles Hollywood offered Asian-American women, moving into directing and producing is more than a side pursuit — it is a way of controlling the story. Every episode she directs and every project she produces widens the space she works in. For the rest of her career on screen, see the filmography; for her parallel life as a painter and exhibited artist, read The Artist.