Huang Di-yang

Huang Di-yang (Chinese: 黃迪揚) is a Taiwanese actor, best known outside Taiwan for playing the detective Chen Ya-zheng in the TTV series Close Your Eyes Before It’s Dark (2016), and the winner of Best Supporting Actor in a Miniseries or Television Film at the 58th Golden Bell Awards.

He grew up in Kaohsiung and came to performance through comedy rather than drama. He learned jokes off television as a boy and tried them out on his classmates, joined the drama club in high school, and moved to Taipei after graduating to read drama at Taipei National University of the Arts, where Shih Ming-shuai was a contemporary.

The plan after university was stand-up. He performed at Live Comedy Club Taipei and interned on the political satire programme Celebrity Imitated Show, then lost interest in comedy and spent a spell working in executive production instead. It was his mentor Lo Pei-an who pushed him back towards acting, writing letters of recommendation to casting directors on his behalf. His first main role followed in the 2010 soap opera Rice Family, then a recurring part in PM10-AM03 from 2012, which he carried into its second and third seasons.

His career has run in stops and starts rather than a clean line. After ten months without work, a university senior, Yen Yi-wen, referred him for the 2014 period drama Lonely River; the war film Dream Flight came the same year and the family drama Happy-Go-Lucky the next. The 2016 detective role in Close Your Eyes Before It’s Dark was the one that made him recognisable. After it came Top Secret (2017), Yong-Jiu Grocery Store and the second season of The Teenage Psychic (2019), and a lead as Wenxi, a film-obsessed drug dealer, in the black comedy The Gangs, The Oscar, And The Walking Dead.

Then the work stopped again. He went two years without a role during the pandemic and worked as a delivery driver to get by, before being cast as A-te in the period drama Hotel Saltwater. In between, in 2023, he played a man with an intellectual disability in the television film To the Sea, the performance that won him the Golden Bell Award. He has since appeared in Taiwan Crime Stories and taken a leading role in the Netflix series Born for the Spotlight, directed and co-written by Yen Yi-wen, the same senior who had referred him a decade earlier.