She was an astronaut

Lucy Liu and Idris Elba perform at The Big Chill 2011 [1][2]

“This will be interesting, because there’s a lot of history behind Sherlock Holmes and Watson, and I’m sure there’s going to be a lot of opinions about the idea that we’re remaking it, and that we named the characters Holmes and Watson, and I’m playing a female Watson and, what’s the deal with that?! So some people are going to be excited that we’re turning it on its head, and some people are going to be kind of shaking their heads, like, ‘This is a bad idea.’

“I mean the thing is, when you go into anything everyone has an opinion.  And when we did Charlie’s Angels, everyone was like ‘This is going to be a huge flop, this is a disaster, this is a mistake.’ And all I could think about was, ‘Wow this is amazing,’ because they’ve cast an Asian person as one of the Angels, and when I was growing up it was the idea that it was all Caucasian. So that was, for me, like, ‘who cares about anything else’? And for me this time it’s about that Watson is a female. And a lot of people who are of ethnic background have come up to me and said, ‘It’s so great that you’re playing Watson and you’re representing a big, you know, minority section of actors and people in the world’.” - Lucy Liu [x]