HONG KONG -- Taiwanese actor Chang Chen's roles include frontier bandit, chess master, emperor and teenage killer, but some of his most intriguing scenes involve sex, and he talks about them freely.
Wearing a grayish blue sweater over his slender frame, the 29-year-old actor with a goatee enters the room tentatively for an interview, like a student shoved in to see the principal.
Chang tumbled in bed with gorgeous Zhang Ziyi in the Oscar-winning "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon." He was seduced by beautiful Gong Li in "Eros."
"Sex scenes are the easiest to film. Everyone is an animal. Everyone is the same when they're making love. It's just a matter of whether the director can direct," Chang said.
Asked about a scene with Gong Li in "Eros," in which Li plays a prostitute who initiates an affair with her innocent tailor -- played by Chang -- by pleasuring him with her hand, Chang said, "I don't think that was explicit. Do you think that was explicit? I don't think it was explicit at all."
"When you stand there and get touched you'll feel very embarrassed. You'll feel embarrassed naturally anyway because there are a lot of people around you. You just have to magnify the embarrassment a bit," he said.
On his sex scene with Zhang in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," Chang said, "My rapport with Zhang Ziyi then was pretty good." Chang plays a frontier bandit who falls in love with an official's daughter, portrayed by Zhang.
He joked that the scene was probably more embarrassing for director Ang Lee, playfully mimicking Lee in telling the couple where to place their hands.
His tryst with Zhang starts off as a fight. As the two tumble on the ground, the tension turns sexual. But there is no transition. One minute they hate each other's guts, the next they want to rip each other's clothes off.
Chang is also skilled at conveying sexual tensions. In "Eros," it's a mixture of pain and pleasure -- pain at the thought of crossing the line of propriety.
He subtly conveys sexual longing in Wong Kar-wai's "Happy Together," the story of a Hong Kong gay couple who try to sort out their relationship in Argentina, starring Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Leslie Cheung.
Chang's character emerges as a rival to Cheung's, looking at Leung with desire. But Chang and Leung never become physically intimate on screen as the relationship is left ambiguous.
Chang isn't defined by his steamy scenes. His first acting job was a child who kills a girl in Taiwanese director Edward Yang's haunting "A Brighter Summer Day."
His upcoming films include Chinese director Tian Zhuangzhuang's "Wu Qingyuan," in which Chang plays a Chinese master of the board game "go" who lives in Japan during the Sino-Japanese conflict.
He went back to school, but after graduation the acting bug eventually caught up with him. After another break for military service, he decided he wanted to focus on acting.
The young actor blossomed under the tutelage of famed Hong Kong art-house director Wong, with whom he worked on "Eros," "Happy Together" and "2046."
Chang's next movie to be released is Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien's "Three Times," which pairs him with the sultry Shu Qi as a couple in three different generations.
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