The mystery of Lusi Zhao

[Cap'n Calhoun]

Chinese actress Lusi Zhao (AKA Zhao Lusi) is listed on several web pages as being part of the cast of Star Trek: Section 31. Some even identify her character as "Wulan."

• https://www.davinotti.com/film/section-31-2025
• https://animesuperhero.com/forums/threads/star-trek-section-31-film-talkback-spoilers.5801118/
• https://nowplayer.now.com/ondemand/detail?id=202507222050034&type=product
  
  

  Lee Crane on Instagram: "Star Trek : Section 31 - Teaser Trailer ☆ In Star Trek: Section 31, Emperor Philippa Georgiou joins a secret division of Starfleet tasked with protecting the United Federation of Planets, and must face the sins of her past.

  15 likes, 0 comments - bruce_usm on December 30, 2024: "Star Trek : Section 31 - Teaser Trailer ☆ In Star Trek: Section 31, Emperor Philippa Georgiou joins a secret division of Starfleet tasked with protecting the United Federation of Planets, and must face the sins of her past. Directed by...

  www.instagram.com
• https://www.cinemagia.ro/filme/star-trek-section-31-3315167/distributie/
• https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_Sektion_31

Now you might think this was a piece of misinformation that popped up somewhere and was just repeated, but the first place I saw her listed was Secret Hideout's web site.

Secret Hideout

Secret Hideout is an award-winning film and TV production company founded in 2012 by writer/producer/director Alex Kurtzman. Alongside Alex Kurtzman, Secret Hideout is led by President of TV Aaron Baiers and President of Film Morgan Earnest.

www.secrethideoutco.com

So here's the mystery: Where did this come from? Was Lusi Zhao part of the cast at some point? Did she film deleted scenes? Are there scenes from this movie that are only in the version in China, like with Iron Man 3? (There was a whole subplot with a Chinese doctor who ultimately removes Tony's Arc Reactor that was only in the Chinese version of the film.) Or was she part of the project and later left it or was fired/cut/replaced?

The fact that Secret Hideout lists her makes me feel like there's probably a story here.

 

[Therin of Andor]

Was she Michelle's stuntwoman?

 

[korblborp]

Was she Michelle's stuntwoman?

she seems to be a screen actress of mostly historical chinese historical romances

 

[Turtletrekker]

Section 31 isn't on her IMDb page, so I'm going to guess that she's not in it.

 

[Turtletrekker]

1. Automated aggregation can create a false association
Entertainment databases often ingest structured data from other databases, distributors, metadata providers, press releases, etc. Suppose somewhere there was data resembling:

Zhao Lusi — Wulan — Section 31

Once that record exists, an automated system might propagate it without anybody checking whether Wulan actually appears in the finished film.
Then another database ingests it, and another one ingests that database.
So you get an apparent consensus that is actually:
one bad record → many automated copies.
That's not really an AI hallucination. It's more like database contagion.
2. An AI/algorithm could actually have generated the association
This is increasingly possible with modern entertainment sites.
An automated system might have encountered things such as:

• Zhao Lusi's name associated with Section 31
• the name Wulan somewhere in production material
• a casting announcement
• an article about the project
• perhaps an early version of the cast

…and inferred the relationship:
Zhao Lusi + Wulan + Section 31 = Zhao Lusi played Wulan in Section 31.
Once that gets written into a structured database, subsequent systems may treat it as established fact.
The really dangerous part is that structured data looks authoritative. A website doesn't have to say “we think Zhao Lusi was in this movie.” It just presents:

Zhao Lusi — Wulan

And then Google sees a nice clean database entry.
3. The "Wulan" part makes me suspect a real underlying data artifact
This is what keeps me from thinking it's simply somebody hallucinating an actress's name.
If the error were:

“Zhao Lusi is in Section 31”

I'd suspect an ordinary mistake.
But:

Zhao Lusi — Wulan — Star Trek: Section 31

is much more structured.
Some system apparently had both a person and a character and a production linked together.
That makes me suspect there really was an underlying piece of production metadata somewhere.
And it doesn't have to mean Zhao Lusi was ever actually hired. It could have been something like a placeholder cast record generated during development.
4. There's an even stranger possibility
An algorithm could have gotten the wrong Zhao Lusi.
Automated systems sometimes merge entities based on names, especially when working across international databases. If there was another person, character, production employee, promotional model, or other piece of metadata associated with Section 31, an entity-resolution system could theoretically have attached it to the Chinese actress.
That would be a classic entity-resolution error:

Person A
↓
similar/identical metadata
↓
algorithm decides Person A = Person B
↓
credit propagates

I'm not saying that's what happened here, but it's one of the mechanisms that can produce a bizarrely specific false credit.

---

The thing that makes me lean toward some kind of automated metadata problem rather than deliberate misinformation is exactly what you've observed:
Nobody who actually knows the movie seems to have encountered Wulan.
If Zhao Lusi had been a real cast member whose scenes were merely obscure, we'd expect something: a photograph, a production interview, a press release, a screenplay reference, a credit, a fan identification, something.
Instead, we have this oddly persistent database ghost.
And “database ghost” may actually be the best description of what's happening: a record that originated somewhere during the production process, survived after the underlying information became obsolete, and then got replicated by machines that had no reason to question it.