No part of this story can be reproduced without permission from 8days.sg.
Ask Jeremy Chan if he thought he would win Best Actor at the 2024 Star Awards, and his first reaction would be “No leh”.
Ask him again, and he would say he thought the winner would either be him or his All That Glitters co-star Desmond Tan.
Ask him a third time and he would concede that he knew was the dark horse. “It was only later [when there was more talk that I could win], that I got nervous,” he tells 8days.sg backstage after the win.
Why so modest, Jeremy? The 42-year-old was the odds-on favourite — it’s like betting on Michael Phelps to swim fastest — to bring home the trophy for his role as a simple-minded man who goes down a path of tragedy in All That Glitters.
And he did so in surprisingly calm fashion.
This is, after all, Jeremy’s first Star Award for acting and his second nomination in the category. The only other time he’s been lauded for his acting was at the Asian Academy Creative Awards in 2018 when he won Best Comedy Performance for My Agent is A Hero. Oh, he also took home his second Top 10 Most Popular Male Artiste award tonight.
No surprises then that everyone expected a tearful, snot-filled speech from him.
When Jeremy took the stage to accept the award from Hong Kong actress Charmaine Sheh, his colleagues in the audience, in particular Special Achievement Award winner Mark Lee, could be heard shouting “Cry!”… and later, um, “Strip!” He was dressed in an all-white Dolce & Gabbana suit that bared his tanned chest.
He tells us he was about to burst into tears until he heard his wife Jesseca Liu yell “Don’t cry! Don’t cry!” from the front row.
It was then that Jeremy, ever the dutiful husband, decided to swallow his tears and steady his “breaking voice” to deliver his speech.
Why didn’t Jess want him to show emotion on stage?
“She feels that for actors, we’re always faced with circumstances that are different. So if you cry all the time, there’s no point to it. You have to handle it calmly,” he says.
Now that he has won Best Actor, does he think he can use it to lord over Jess who has yet to bring home a Star Award for acting? P/S: She did go home with an All-Time Favourite Award tonight though so draw?
“No lah,” he laughs. “We have never been the kind to compare each other’s achievements. We teach other and guide each other. I think after getting married, she has been teaching me. Both of you cannot be the same shape. You have to be complete first before you can give the other person more things. [Jesseca] is [a] very complete [person] so when I’m with her, she fills up the parts that I lack. Like when it comes to winning awards. She keeps telling me to not think too much and to be calm.”
Catch Jeremy’s winning moment below: