Actress Rebecca Lim gets candid about being 'abused'
By Ilsa Chan, channelnewsasia.com | Posted: 24 November 2009 1033 hrs

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SINGAPORE : She's a sporty, sunshine girl with a bubbly personality but unfortunately, viewers rarely get to see this side of MediaCorp actress Rebecca Lim.

Of late, the 23-year-old just can't seem to get away from depressing roles. Last seen playing Susie, a prostitute with a troubled and abusive past in English drama series "Fighting Spiders", Lim takes on the role of a victim of domestic violence in upcoming sitcom "Mr & Mrs Kok".

In "Mr & Mrs Kok" which debuts November 26 on Channel 8, Lim's character, Mimi, is allegedly assaulted by her husband. Unable to take the psychological and physical abuse, she engages private investigators to gather evidence in order to file for divorce.

"She's been married to her husband for six, seven years and they have been trying for a baby but it doesn’t happen. So her husband brings her to see mediums and the mediums give them very strange instructions like to beat her private areas every night until there are bruises. And before she sleeps, she is told to lie in a very weird position and they hang like little paper dolls around the house so it's a bit eerie and scary at the same time," explained Lim.

"Abused again?" I blurted when Lim described the role.

"I know," whined the actress. "I don't know why, but they [the producers] say I have that kind of face that can be beaten.

"There are a lot of emotional [scenes], some crying scenes. Crying scenes are always emotionally-draining for me because I am not the kind who can switch and the tears will just flow. I must really be in the mood to cry."

And the crying doesn't stop there. Lim also plays a breast cancer victim in an upcoming Channel U telemovie, and is set to reprise her role as Susie in "Fighting Spiders" when it returns for a second season next year.

But Lim takes it in her stride and sees every role as a learning experience and a chance to improve her acting.

During the interview, she told this reporter about the “huge problems” she had when she first started acting four years ago. Fresh after the Miss Singapore Universe 2005 pageant where she finished second and caught the eye of talent scouts, Lim signed on with MediaCorp. Just 19 years old then, Lim's first role was a small part in a Mandarin drama series.

"I was this secretary in an office. My role was very simple, I just pass documents and had very simple lines. But all my scenes were in the studio and it was my first time seeing three cameras so I was a bit tensed and I was perspiring in the air con room, I was that scared,” she recounted.

And it wasn't just the bad acting that drew flak, so did her poor Mandarin.

She said, "If you think my Mandarin is bad now, it was a hundred times worse than this. I started out with very bad comments and it took a while for me to get a second role because after that, everyone was like 'she cannot [do it]'.

"Thinking back it's very pai seh (Hokkien for embarrassing). It was my first drama and I was quite excited about it even though it's a small role. You are so hyped up about something then people just keep banging you, there was not a single good comment at all. It was very demoralising because after that, for a whole year, I didn't get any assignments."

But Lim picked herself up and followed the advice of veteran actors to practise her facial expressions in the mirror.

"Because sometimes you think that you are portraying this look but it is no different from your other expressions, so that’s what I tried to do and basically just brushed up on my Mandarin.

“So when I started getting dramas again, I was like 'okay, I better not screw up anymore.'"

Thankfully, she gets some reprieve from the string of depressing roles, playing a pupil in the legal drama "The Pupil" which is set to air on Channel 5 in December.

Though regurgitating legal jargon was tough, it wasn't new to the actress who majored in law at the Singapore Management University (SMU) where she graduated in July this year.

"My parents are so happy because it's the first role that I got since I graduated. I did accountancy and law so they were like 'at least you are putting your degree to some use, to a certain extent... at least your first role is not a prostitute,'" she said.

"Currently I really enjoy what I am doing... so I just want to do this for as long as I can. My degree is just something to fall back on and it's something to make my parents and grandparents happy. They would never allow me to go into this [acting] without a degree so it's just something to put their minds at ease and just get it over with."

- CNA