Do You Feel Like Chicken Tonight - This Year?

What better way to usher in the Year of the Rooster than to talk c***, sing song and play mahjong? And so we did — well, one of the above anyway. Who knew talking rooster with TAY PING HUI would end up as sheer poultry, we mean, poetry?

- Jasmine Teo

“I can talk c*** to anyone,” declares Tay Ping Hui, who is taking the concept of our Chinese New Year cover shoot quite seriously.

The 46-year-old star plays with chickens pretty well too — he gets all chook-ed up at today’s cover shoot, cradling a faux chicken like the newborn child he doesn’t (yet?) have, and waves a feather duster at Chicken Little like a discipline master (yes, the macabre irony isn’t past us). At the end of the day, it dawns upon him. “I’m just the prop for the rooster!” he huffs. In jest. We hope.

But Ping Hui, born the Year of the Dog, shouldn’t be worried about playing second fiddle to poultry. When said chicken isn’t in frame, TPH commands the stage with deft kungfu moves that Jet Li would approve of. He swings his weapon (yes, the feather duster) like Donnie Yen brandishes his staff in Rogue One. And you better run and hide when the 1.86m-tall actor leaps around the studio with pugilistic perfection. Never mind that, swathed in a trench coat and boots, he looks more suited for autumn in New York than a Mongolian warlord leading a pack of troops in battle. Which is exactly what he did, by the way. He played Genghis Khan in Chinese period drama Legend of the Condor Heroes, and was weighed down by a 15kg costume while he rode one of the 100 horses in the herd. “If I fell off, I’d pretty much get trampled to death,” he recalls of the shoot in China.Less life-threatening but no less bad-ass is his next project — he reprises the role of villain Peter Tay in Ch 5’s Tanglin, which begins filming this month.