Years ago, as I was ordering some lunch at the old Mediacorp canteen, a text message pinged into my phone. It was Desmond Tan. “Hey, something is missing: A smile on your face,” he’d texted.
From afar, he had spotted my sizeable scowl at just the moment that someone had cut my queue.
This is classic Desmond: Eternally positive, infectiously happy and never without a smile on his face.
“I guess I’m chirpy,” he said, with a laugh. “I enjoy being happy, and I think that should be the ultimate goal for everyone – to wake up happy, go to bed happy, and of course be happy in between. So, I choose to be happy.”
Even with on-set conditions being much more restrictive these days thanks to COVID-19, the 34-year-old finds amusing spins to put on things.
“We have to wear a face shield and mask when not filming, and that took me a while to get used to. In the beginning, we’d always forget to put it back on after [the director yells] ‘cut’. Nowadays, we are so used to it that before [the director yells] ‘action’, we forget to take it off. And sometimes, you forget you have it on, and when you try to hydrate on set, the bottle bangs into the face shield and you look stupid!”
He also gleefully told me, “We’re not supposed to have much physical contact in the shows – there’s no kissing at all, and we reduce close-proximity scenarios as well, so it makes dating in the show a little bit awkward.” While on-camera hand-holding is allowed, “there’s a safety officer on set and right after ‘cut’, she runs to us to give us hand sanitiser – usually in excess!”
He’s also found ways to enjoy activities he previously couldn’t – such as, of all things, riding the bus.
“I wanted to try to take public transport as everyone would be wearing a mask and no one would recognise me,” he said, recounting how he hopped on the bus to work at 6am in the morning. “It was quite fun for me. My bus ride was about half an hour – I put on a Korean OST [original sound track] and it felt almost like a Korean holiday.”
