Barbie fever is all anyone can discuss. (Myself included.) The film’s tagline might claim that “Barbie is the whole lot. He’s just Ken,” but Kenneth Sean “Ken” Carson, the Pisces doll born two years and two days junior to Barbie, has done a great job of making headlines of his own. Ryan Gosling’s coined terms “Kenergy” and “You’re Kenough” have kept us wanting to learn more about how Barbie’s love interest plays out on screen. But Gosling isn’t the one Ken. There are several of them in Barbie Land, including Simu Liu.

“It is a movie about Barbies and Kens, but really, at the top of the day, it is a movie about humanity, and what it means to be human, and what it means to grow,” says Liu, who plays one in all many versions of the doll within the upcoming Barbiea movie whose specific plot details have up to now been kept impressively under wraps. “To have these conversations about patriarchy and toxic masculinity, where these items come from — how are we complicit in it? How will we attack it?” It could seem heavy handed to have those conversations in a movie a few life-size plaything — the movie is literally about dolls — but Liu says it goes there in a nuanced fashion. “It’s inconceivable to have [this] movie without commenting on this idea of gender as an entire. And I just think that Greta does it so beautifully.”

Liu, who says that the role of Ken was the primary audition he had since Shang Chiwas “desperate” to play Ken. “It was hands down the most effective script that I ever read,” he recalls. “I used to be like, ‘I’ll do whatever I want to do — get me on this movie.’”