Working alongside your loved ones can sound like the best thing ever or an absolute nightmare, but this isn’t local actor Lim Yu-Beng and his daughter Shi-An’s first rodeo.
They were previously seen together on Project Premiere’s Sephia and the Suria drama SR115; however, their upcoming project, Mediacorp’s thriller Alienated, is a different beast altogether.
Yu-Beng, 57, told AsiaOne in an interview yesterday (April 19): “Sephia was one hour of television, and this is six hours of television, so that’s quite different. In Sephia, we played father and daughter, and although you’re exploring quite a lot of material, it is material that you recognise.
“Alienated shows quite a different relationship, so yeah, it’s somewhere else.”
Shi-An agreed: “To me, Alienated pushed some emotional boundaries that I feel we didn’t cross in our previous project, and it was a lot more physically and emotionally taxing.”
The English series marks Shi-An’s first leading role as well, after she recently appeared as a supporting character on Mediacorp’s drama Third Rail.
“I feel like I’m really lucky because this show has fighting involved, it has a lot of VFX — it’s really an all-encompassing project, and I just really wanted to do a good job,” the 25-year-old said. “I wanted to prove to people that I can do [those] things and so that was the kind of pressure I was facing.”
Alienated is a social thriller that follows Luna (Shi-An) who travels through multiple universes. It is adapted from the South Korean short film Human Form (2016) by director Noh Do-yeon, who directs two episodes of Alienated.
Yu-Beng, whose own role remains shrouded in mystery, jokingly referred to the series as “Cinderella in the Matrix”.
‘I don’t care who you are, you better bloody do your job’
Being the child of two actors — Yu-Beng and his ex-wife, veteran actress Tan Kheng Hua — Shi-An is sure to raise some eyebrows and murmurs of being a “nepo baby”, but it was she who was first cast for Alienated, with her father joining the project later.
“For the production side, they already knew they wanted her — they’d already contracted her and were going through pre-production and prepping with her,” Yu-Beng said. “Mine was the role that was not yet determined.”
He was also candid in defending his daughter and revealing his stance on the matter of nepotism: “You know, there’s something kind of painfully hilarious about this. We live in a country where our Prime Minister is the son of a previous Prime Minister, and it’s hilarious that we keep coming back to this.
“At the end of the day, I guess nobody gives a s***, right? Can you do the job? Because if you cannot do the job, get off. If you can do the job, please do it, and do it to the best of your ability. I don’t care who you are, you better bloody do your job. That’s certainly the attitude we have.”
He added that the mindset was one he shared with Shi-An, and it was also the reason she was “hard on herself”. Yu-Beng is also proud of her for being a professional and handling herself well on the set.
Shi-An added: “I cannot help that I so happen to love the same thing that my parents do.”
She agreed that there were certain advantages that she had, like knowing people in the industry and its processes, but that she auditioned and got her role in Alienated “fair and square”.
“At the end of the day, I hope that people see me for being a good actress and not because I am the child of certain actors,” she continued. “I think I want my work to speak for itself, and if that happens, then I guess I don’t have to justify myself.”
Shi-An is far from the only second-generation actor in Singapore. Others include Lin Meijiao and Huang Yiliang’s daughter Chantalle Ng, Xiang Yun and Edmund Chen’s children Chen Xi and Chen Yixin, as well as Hong Huifang and Zheng Geping’s children Tay Ying and Calvert Tay.
Compared to them, Shi-An joked: “Everyone says ‘nepo baby’ but I’m actually a nobody. [There are others who] are definitely more well-known than me, but that’s okay. I want to have recognition, but that’s because I want my work to be good.”
She hopes her love for acting and wanting to hone the craft was “palpable enough” for people to look beyond assumptions of how she got her position.
Baby on the set of Phua Chu Kang
Shi-An has been exposed to film sets since she was a toddler, Yu-Beng told us.
“She used to go with Kheng Hua to the (Channel 5 sitcom) Phua Chua Kang set. From the age of two or lower, she knew how to keep quiet when she heard ‘rolling’ and only make sounds when she heard ‘cut’,” he said.
As a child, Shi-An was also privy to all of Kheng Hua and Yu-Beng’s work discussions.
“She would hear all this stuff, and she would join in and she would be a participant in those conversations, and learn to evaluate through those conversations and to have her own voice as well,” Yu-Beng added.
It comes as no surprise that she pursued acting from a young age, first in School of the Arts (Sota) and then double-majoring in Theatre Studies and Business Management in the National University of Singapore (NUS).
Back then, it wasn’t something Shi-An was thinking of having as a career but felt that it was just something she was “compelled to do”. It was only in the last few years of her education that Shi-An said that she made active efforts to look for jobs in the industry.
After graduating last year, Shi-An is freelancing at the moment, but acting is something she said she “really, really” wants to pursue full-time.
“The jobs don’t come one after the other unless you’re super in demand, but I’m just beginning and Alienated will be the first major thing I have to show people,” she said.
“So I still want to do my freelance jobs in order to make money and keep myself afloat, but at the same time, I’m gonna work on acting, and hopefully, more things will come up.”
Alienated also stars Lina Ng, Bryan Wong, Jason Goldwin Chang, David Matthews and Estelle Fly, and is set to release in November.
