A famous Netflix actor in Taiwan has caused outrage after indicating he would make his partner get an abortion if she was pregnant with a girl.

Mike He, 37, also spelled Mike Ho, is the star of hit TV series about time travel and the supernatural The Devil Punisher, the result of a Netflix collaboration with Taiwanese cable TV company Sanlih E-Television in which he plays a deity called Zhong Kui that has been reincarnated to fight demons.

The star reportedly made the comments during an interview in November 2020 with local media outlet NOWnews, but they have only recently caused a stir with Chinese speaking netizens on social media who reacted with outrage.

During the interview, he reportedly said that he would be looking into certain “practices” while hoping that the gender of his third child would be male.

He also reportedly added: “Nowadays, it seems like you can determine the baby’s gender at about seven to eight weeks, I want to be sure that it’s a boy before giving birth. Otherwise, I think two daughters is enough.”

The interviewer then reportedly asked him whether or not he would be keeping the baby if his wife’s third pregnancy revealed that she was carrying a girl and he replied that he “probably would not want to” if it turned out to be a girl.

The actor has since apologised on Weibo, dubbed the Chinese Twitter, and said that both boys and girls are equal.

While some netizens attempted to defend him, most reportedly had a problem with the notion of him trying to “control” what his wife does with her body.