The Bright Path

Desmond Tan opens up about personal growth, pandemic lessons and the progress he’d like to see.

- Jeffrey Yan

Desmond Tan may be a household name now, but his journey to the top of the Singaporean entertainment industry wasn’t always so clear-cut. In 2007, fresh out of National Service and waiting for university to start, the then 21-year-old was serving a two-week retail stint that made him utterly miserable when his friends nudged him towards Mediacorp’s Mandarin talent contest Star Search. “I got into the finals and deferred my studies by a semester; when I graduated, I told myself, why not give it two years in the industry and if things don’t work out, I can always just go back to what I studied, which was real estate,” he shares. We will never know Desmond Tan the real estate whiz, for things did work out and he has been mesmerizing Singaporeans on screen for 14 years now.