December 26th is the day after Christmas, and also the birthday of C-actor Wu Lei it turns out. Age starts to mean less after a certain point but in the trajectory of child-teen acting prodigies it means a lot because the audience is curious to see watch a child grow up before our eyes. Wu Lei has been a child actor for over a decade but really hit the big times with a teen role as the young sidekick to Hu Ge‘s male lead in the critically acclaimed hit period C-drama Nirvana in Fire.

The drama aired only two years ago in 2015 but was filmed the prior year in 2014 so Wu Lie was only 14-15 years old when he played Fei Liu, and he definitely looked it all adorably scrawny. But in the intervening three years he had really hit that boy-to-young-man growth spurt on all cylinders, adding 6 inches of height and looks like 30 pounds of lean muscle. I’m not fangirling him because he’s now hot, instead marveling at how lucky he is to have reached his visual potential because he’s certainly got the acting talent as well. Happy birthday to this charismatic young man, the sky’s the limit for his acting career based on well-liked he is with C-netizens.