Melissa Rayworth on portraying the British prime minister in a Chinese government biopic of Deng Xiaoping: “They saw her not as a real person but as a cartoon bad guy – the embodiment of an empire that, in their eyes, had taken a piece of China more than a century before and held the Middle Kingdom hostage when it tried to get the island back. … How do you portray a world leader when the people who hired you see her as nothing more than a parody?”