by May Seah
The differences had to be very subtle, of course, but therein lay the fascination of the task. As one character, he would hold his spoon in a certain manner, or his chopsticks with different fingers; or he would rest his elbows on the edge of the table at a precise angle. He could alter his chewing speeds and styles. He could swallow pointedly before he spoke or talk loutishly with his mouth semi-full. If he was at a long mahogany table dressed with brocaded placemats, heavy china and floral arrangements, he could twirl his fork or play with his wine glass. If he was at a hawker centre amid the chaos of brightly coloured melamine plates, blasting electric fans and the passing opportunistic mynah, he could stab at pieces of steamed chicken with varying degrees of violence. Some characters would hunch over the table like Slinkies; others would sit ramrod straight in their chairs; still others might prop one leg over the other knee and shake a foot distractedly. The way you dined, and how you carried on a conversation while you were dining, could convey so much about who you were.
There was usually at least one dinner table scene in each project, and there was always the issue of continuity. For each particular scene, you couldn’t be eating steamed fish in one take and tofu in another take, in case the takes got spliced during the editing process. It would break the audience’s suspension of disbelief, just like if you forgot which shirt you were wearing for which take and ended up wearing different shirts in the same scene. The most foolproof way to get around this was to pick one homogenous-looking dish and keep nibbling on it; like broccoli, which was always a good choice if he also knew he had a shirtless scene or photo shoot coming up.
Acting at being a professional actor meant viewing his working life as a series of acts and scenes. The imaginary camera started rolling once he walked onto a set, and the character subsumed everything.
When he was acting, he entered a different space, a different plane of existence, where the cameras and crew in his peripheral vision blurred away into nothing and he no longer existed, only the pulsing emotion did. It was like being overtaken by an invisible force. It was like being borne on a current of sound and light waves. It was like the out-of-body experience of driving endlessly up the dizzying spiral ramp of a multi-storey car park.
Each morning, as he pulled up in the parking lot, got prepped in hair and make-up and changed his clothes in his dressing room, he climbed, limb by limb, synapse by synapse, into his actor persona. And each morning, when he entered his dressing room, he was ritually forced to fight his way through cartons and cartons of vanilla yoghurt.
The yoghurt was delivered each day by the mail room guys, who had to transport it into the building in motorised carts. The little blue-and-white plastic pots swarmed the floor daily in tottering heaps, forcing him to clamber through them like Prince Charming slashing his way through briar bushes to Sleeping Beauty. A little while later, the cleaning crew would come by and cart it all away, only to repeat the process the very next day.
It started when he’d played a sentimental ghost trapped in the world of the living who had an insatiable fondness for vanilla yoghurt. This particular ghost, defying all ectoplasmic laws, would scarf vanilla yoghurt down with the enthusiasm of a Labrador retriever, then lick the spoon and ask for more.
When the show aired, audiences latched onto the quirk and found it adorable. Reporters would ask him on camera, “How about that vanilla yoghurt, eh?” and he’d had no choice but to laugh as if it was the cutest thing in the world. The fans immediately began to send him avalanches of vanilla yoghurt.
“You can’t tell them you don’t actually like it—they’d be devastated,” said Minnie, his manager, and promptly proceeded to sign him up for a vanilla yoghurt endorsement deal. That was a year ago. The yoghurt was still arriving.
He couldn’t donate it to the poor because by the time it got to them, it would have gone bad. Now and then someone would walk by and take one, but most of his co-workers were sick of it, too. “Eat my yoghurt” had become a common epithet and inside joke among him and the crew. Each day, several dumpsters in the back lot were filled to the brim with cartons of vanilla yoghurt.
Apart from the risk he faced daily of stepping on a stray pot and breaking his neck, he was fortunate to have no real adversaries in showbiz. Nor did he have any close friends.
One of his first friends in the industry had been Jerome Goh, a colleague who happened to be of the same age. They had starred in one or two shows together as rivals in love and in water polo. Jerome subsequently built a respectable career on taking his shirt off.
When they started to rise in popularity at a similar rate, fans and reporters began asking each of them, “How do you cope with the pressure from the competition between the two of you?” and “Tell the truth—how do you really feel about each other?”
There hadn’t been any competitive feelings—except maybe that Keh was conscious that Jerome was a little bit taller and a lot funnier than he was—but after the whole thing started to snowball, his cordial friendship with Jerome became irretrievably awkward.
Truth be told, the real rivalry was between their wardrobe stylists, who thrived on the energy and battled to outdo each other in the suits, shoes and snapbacks they dressed the actors in.
But everyone thought that Keh and Jerome hated each other’s guts, and protesting otherwise only proved the fact in people’s minds.
Eventually, it was just easier to do what was expected of them, so they made it a point never to stand together at events, and one would occasionally make snarky comments about the other, which the other would later read with private amusement.
People needed things to polarise, he thought, just like how winners needed losers and good guys needed bad guys to exist.
Bad guys were fun to play and, by sheer nature of their visibility, won you awards easily. He had a shiny trophy on a shelf at home for playing a one-handed serial killer who worked at Starbucks by day and dismembered dentists by night. Now, each time he went to get his teeth cleaned, he thought of mocha Frappuccinos and packets of fake blood.
It was good when he got a jaw-clenching villain to play. When fans came up to him to say, “Man, you were so evil in that show where you played a corporate scion plotting to demolish Newton Food Centre and build a shopping mall; I wanted to poke a satay stick into your jugular vein,” his job satisfaction levels went through the roof. To hate was as good a cathartic experience as any.
In any case, bad guys, it must be noted, were simply delusional good guys. Nobody ever thought of themselves as a bad guy. Besides, he thought, we all have our own predilections; it’s just that some are more likely to get us busted than others.
It wasn’t that good guys were duds to play, but that, because the audience was by default already on their side, you had to work harder to keep their interest. You always had to think about how to magnify realistic aspects of a character, even though—no, especially since—they were already larger than life.
Once, after he had played a blind gigolo working the Geylang streets to fund his little sister’s insurmountable medical bills, a reporter asked how he had managed to portray the role so movingly. Had he based his performance on any one person, encountered during the course of his research, perhaps? He hadn’t done any research, and he had found the question both hilariously funny and devastatingly sad. Also, someone who later saw him driving his car called the police on him, complaining that it was irresponsible for a blind man to operate a vehicle. The police officer filed a written report, made him sign it and asked him for a selfie.
Responses from the public generally varied according to his latest role. He’d had iconic roles, of course, such as that of Zero Gravity Man in the Galactic Godfathers movie trilogy based on the comic book series of the same name, or the suave but sensitive Darkley Young in the tear-jerking romantic comedy Midnight at Mount Pleasant. But for the most part, whenever he met with fans, they were excited to discuss whichever project of his was currently out in cinemas or airing on TV, even if it was to do no
thing more than hail him loudly by the character’s name.
If you turned your television on at eight o’clock in the evenings, you would see Adjonis Keh in Fly Me Away, a drama series about the secret life of air crew, starring as a pilot who was also trained in first-aid. In the first episode, his character fortuitously resuscitated a junior stewardess who had passed out somewhere above Uzbekistan. It was a light-hearted series peppered with eccentric characters, but his was the straight man because, as his manager had declared without regard for his feelings, he did not possess a face for comedy.
One airline had already offered him free flights in exchange for social media mentions while he travelled. The pleasantness of that was tempered by the crippling fear that, should either a medical or aviation emergency arise in mid-flight, he would be asked with sincere faith and expectation to assist.
And then there was the time when he’d played a mer-alien who could glow in the dark. After crashing to earth from his distant home planet, landing just off the shores of Sentosa Island and plunging headfirst into a chance encounter with an attractive human female, it was revealed that his character had the unique quality of phosphorescence from his face to his bare torso to the tips of his tail fins—a veritable Olympian achievement for the lighting and special effects guys.
Thanks to the role, he’d been appointed ambassador for vitamin supplements that made you “glow from the inside out”, for a company that manufactured LED lights, and for a campaign against the consumption of shark’s fin.
Sometimes people would ask him if it was difficult to deal with fame. Sure, there were times when the fact that his face was a public commodity made him feel a little like a quokka in a petting zoo. But this problem, for the most part, was serendipitously managed by his naturally cultivated habit of staying home all the time he wasn’t working, and never really feeling the desire to go anywhere.
After assuming his actor persona, he started making enough money to move into a penthouse condominium on Shallot Road; it was just off the manic Orchard Road thoroughfare but, because of its topography, remained a relatively hidden lane shrouded by ancient angsana trees. He had chosen the place more for its tight security than for its swanky location or architectural features.
He didn’t have an eye for decorating—his stylist often lamented that he had the aesthetic sensibilities of a blind chameleon—so his flat was sparse; one of its two defining features was that blackout curtains hung in every window. His manager Minnie’s frequent adage, from the first day he’d met her, had always been, “Just remember: people are watching everything you do.”
The other defining feature was its conspicuous lack of a television.
It would have been considered a twist of irony that someone in his line of work did not possess even the smallest of flat screens. But everyone who had ever heard of him knew the oft-reported fact of Adjonis Keh’s unusual medical condition: his eyes, while beautiful, were unable to look at screens for longer than one or two minutes at a time.
He could still text briefly or glance at the playbacks on the director’s screen at work, although he tried to keep these activities to a minimum. But things like playing video games and surfing the Internet were activities of the past.
If he had perhaps been a gardener, a bartender or a ridge-backed marsupial conservationist, this rare condition would not have affected him as much in his professional capacity. But, as an actor, it had a strongly complex effect on him: he had never seen even one of his own works in its entirety. This was his biggest regret in life.
Not being able to watch his own performances meant that he could not correct his mistakes for the benefit of future performances. However, on the flip side, it also meant that he never had the opportunity to obsess over what he could have done better, after it was too late.
In addition, he was unable to personally maintain any of his own social media accounts, so Minnie and his personal assistant worked in tandem to handle that task. It was one thing less for him to worry about—and besides, he didn’t have any aptitude for chronicling and sharing his daily adventures, whether historic or banal.
In terms of job satisfaction, though, it always bothered him that he could never enjoy the sense of accomplishment that comes with surveying a final product and seeing the work of several months and countless colleagues come together in a unified whole. It was also strange when his friends, family and colleagues discussed his current works and he could not participate fully, because he could not envision exactly what they had seen on screen after all the edits had been made, the music and voiceovers had been added in, and the special effects had been rendered.
It also meant he could not study the screen performances of other actors, so these had neither the power to inspire him to greater heights nor cause his acting to become affectedly derivative. In fact, the only dramatic performances he had watched since he left school were stage plays and the ingratiating behaviour of select colleagues in front of persons of consequence.
Whenever he assumed his actor character—and this was not limited to on-set filming, but also came in useful at events and press conferences where the scrutiny made him nervous—he was never quite sure what the personage he was envisioning was really like.
But if he were pressed to describe this actor, well, he would probably be a cloudy mix of Clark Gable and Chow Yun-fat, maybe with a hint of Morgan Freeman or Sir Ian McKellen, and a dash of Bertolt Brecht thrown in for good measure.
Whoever he was, Keh blessed the day he had been birthed from the clamshell of his mind. People loved that guy, and so did he.
3
Keh did not tell anyone about the key to his professional success, and no one ever knew the truth—until the day he met the new reporter.
He remembered it clearly as the day he was also filming one of his first scenes for the period drama The Second-to-Last Magistrate—a complicated martial arts battle sequence—in Studio Eight. The set was a teahouse—all little wooden stools and calligraphy on the walls, with a mezzanine balcony from which they were going to fly through the air, when he rescued the emperor’s illegitimate daughter from her dastardly kidnappers.
As the titular official, he was a ruthlessly upright and appropriately cunning legislator who also had a sensitive and romantic soul. The physical mannerisms were key here, especially with the character’s wardrobe consisting of yards of flowing and probably very flammable fabric. But also he had to have a magisterial quality, which Keh interpreted to mean he was as judgemental as a teenage schoolgirl and as inscrutable as a Vegas poker hustler. And in his tender moments of gallant courtship, he had to be as vulnerable as a Pekingese offering up its tender belly to be scratched.
But Keh was not particularly feeling the milk of human kindness coursing through his veins at the moment, because he had spent more than an hour waiting for his habitually late female co-star.
The thing that nobody realised was that most of an actor’s time on set was spent in the tedious occupation of waiting. If it wasn’t your co-star dawdling, it was the director changing his mind about something, or the lights going wonky and taking a long time to set up, or the extras being re-instructed to not hold their props upside down. Extras were always a funny breed and the more of them you had on set, the more liability was on your hands. One recurring extra, a little man on the wrong side of middle age, had once sidled up to him and murmured, “Don’t tell anybody about the orange grenade in the urinal,” then shuffled furtively off. Keh always kept a wary eye on him from then on.
Waiting was part of the job, as painfully soporific as filling in paperwork or taking meeting minutes. Keh usually killed time by studying his scripts or grazing at the snacks table—although he had noticed of late that the spread of victuals had been dwindling. Where previously there had been trays of fried noodles, curried prawns, chicken wings, kale salads, coconut jellies and pandan cake, today there were only vegetable samosas and egg mayo sandwiches. It made airplane food look downright presidential.
As he paced the shiny black floors of the cavernous sound stage, avoiding the wires and bits of gaffer tape that always littered the floor, Keh discarded his usual placidity for mounting impatience. The glue around the widow’s peak of his wig was starting to make his forehead itch. And his period shoes were pinching his toes.
It was a cardinal sin for an actor to hold up a scene with their tardiness. But The Second-to-Last Magistrate’s female lead—one of Keh’s most frequent co-stars and on-screen love interests, the renowned Holliday Heng—had the buoyant quality of never allowing social niceties to bother her. In fact, Keh suspected it was a point of pride for her to be fashionably late. The joke was that Holliday Heng didn’t really exist—she had been simply Photoshopped into real life, and at least a good ten minutes after everybody else had assembled.
Apart from the fact that she always walked with an impossibly straight carriage, her sculpted head never moving on her long neck, she had that sort of glossy perfection that was slightly jarring when viewed from close range.
Her deportment and demeanour suggested that it was a congenital condition—she was accustomed to having been admired as wholly flawless since birth—even though there was more than one rumour that her bosoms had enlarged their spheres of influence over the years, or that her eyelids had risen to prominence after an extended sojourn in a Gangnam establishment in Seoul.
