Lawrence Wong - The Hardest Working Man In Showbiz

From background actor to an international star, Lawrence Wong takes on his next big assignment, his first lead role in a mediacorp series.

- Wayne Cheong

Lawrence Wong has a cough that sneaks in every now and then. At first it starts as a conversational comma, a mild distraction, but as the hours tick by, it graduates into something that you can’t ignore. Midway in the interview, his manager, a genial woman named Joyce, hands Wong his bag where he fishes out his medication.

I pause as he pops a pink pill into his mouth. Swallowing, Wong says: “Don’t worry about me. Let’s continue.”

We had agreed to meet at the tail-end of June, which was when he would be back in Singapore for a fan meeting; his first. Organised by a local fan club called The Lawves—a portmanteau of his name and ‘loves’—the meet will be held later at Chinatown Point.

Wong stifles a cough. This ailment was something he had been battling with for a while. “I’d notice that in the past few years, I’ve been falling sick quite easily,” Wong says. (At this point, Joyce, who is standing to the side, nods.) “I may be ill but I have to push through.” Wong’s fanbase swelled after he appeared as Hai Lan Cha, the cordial palace guard, in Story of Yanxi Palace but there were some diehard devotees even before his China debut. “After all”, Wong says, “they have stuck with me ever since I first started acting at Mediacorp. You can’t take them for granted. I’m indebted to them.”

There are some actors who are overnight successes and there are others who worked their way up the ranks. For Wong, he is in his own special category. He freelanced at Mediacorp, putting in the hours for cameos and bit parts. According to his filmography, one of the earliest roles was for a movie called One Last Dance in 2006. In it, Wong is credited simply as Man II.