Ray Chang

Ray Chang, born Chang Chia Chen, is a Taiwanese actor who has also been credited as Bryant Chang. He attended Taipei Municipal Nangang Vocational High School and Taipei Physical Education College. He first appeared on screen in a small part in the 2002 feature Double Vision and moved into television the following year with the series Seventh Grade Student, followed by the idol dramas Love Contract in 2004 and Express Boy in 2005. In 2006 he played Jonathan, also known as Kang Cheng Hsing, in the coming of age film Eternal Summer, for which he won Best New Performer at the 43rd Golden Horse Awards, and the same year he appeared in the series Tokyo Juliet. His subsequent credits span more than thirty television series and fifteen films, among them Invitation Only, Yang Yang, Rail Truck and Light the Night. In 2021 he took the supporting role of Pei Shou Yi in the boys love series We Best Love, and in 2023 he appeared in Uncle.

He had been working in the entertainment industry for roughly three years before Eternal Summer (盛夏光年) reached cinemas, so his screen acting debut in that film came after a period of other industry work rather than straight out of training. The film premiered in 2006 and won him the Golden Horse Best New Performer award at his first attempt. He worked for much of the following period in sunny, affluent leading man parts, and by the early 2020s was actively seeking roles with more range.

For Eternal Summer (盛夏光年, 2006), his screen debut, he has said the director's instruction was to imagine the other person as a girl he liked, and that he combined that guidance with his own earlier experience of affection that was not returned in order to play the part convincingly. He later said he was interested in taking on characters at the margins. For his guest role in Light the Night (華燈初上) he worked from an unusually small amount of material, two scenes and two pages of script, with no account of the surrounding story.

In his own words. "I only had two scenes. The script I was given was two sheets of paper, and what I know even now is very limited." (Interview with Mirror Media, 28 January 2022, on his guest appearance in Light the Night (華燈初上).) "When I took the job all I knew was that I was playing Hanako's former boyfriend. When the script arrived it did not explain what came before or after in the plot." (Interview with Mirror Media, 28 January 2022, on how little he was told about Light the Night (華燈初上).) "Whether he counts as that sort of man is probably for the audience to decide once they have watched it." (Interview with Mirror Media, 28 January 2022, on how his Light the Night character would be read.) "To be a good actor you should have more thickness and more breadth." (Interview with Mirror Media, 28 January 2022, on wanting to move beyond the sunny, well off characters he had been cast as.) "The Golden Horse Award is a great encouragement to me, and I hope to make more good films in the future." (Remarks recorded on winning Best New Performer at the 43rd Golden Horse Awards, 25 November 2006, archived by Taiwan's National Cultural Memory Bank.)