Making Headlines

A Malaysian boy who grew up shuttling between Johor and Singapore, Ronny Chieng has since gone global with roles on Netflix and CBS

- Celeste Goh

Ronny Chieng was late to the photoshoot despite his publicists stressing to us via email in the days leading up to it that he had time constraints. Initially, we could only have an hour with him. Thankfully, we managed to negotiate for extra time, albeit with a hard stop at 5pm as he had a flight back to New York to catch. (At six that evening, Chieng was still dining with LOL Asia founder Rizal Kamal at the hotel we did the photoshoot.)

“I’m like, drenched,” his message came in through WhatsApp almost 30 minutes after our scheduled call time of 3pm. “I’ve been wrestling, guys.”

As it turned out, Chieng had managed to slip out of One World Hotel unnoticed some time between his lunch and our scheduled appointment, first to renowned traditional bone-setting centre Chris Leong Method Tit Tar, then to a local gym for a session of Brazilian Jiu-jitsu (BJJ) – something he had picked up last year.

You’d think that he would be sleeping in that Sunday at the hotel, at least until it was time to saunter downstairs for our shoot. Chieng had, after all, just done two shows the night before at The Platform at Menara Ken TTDI, with barely a two-hour break between them. He was in Singapore the day before, by the way, for two other shows in the city.

“It was such a contrast to my first performance in Zouk KL back in 2011, when I tripped and smashed the glass floor going onstage. The crowd was totally different last night. People had paid good money and come a long way to watch the show,” Chieng recounts.