Are you dating anyone now?
Unfortunately not. I’m turning 32 (Ferlyn’s birthday is on Feb 1st) and single (Chuckles and lets out an exasperated sigh).
Do you feel pressure to get into a relationship or get married?
When I was in my late 20s, yes. When I was 30, I was dating somebody I thought I would marry. Now, I am not in a rush. I’m okay to be single. I don’t want to just find somebody and settle. If it comes, it comes.
Does your family rush you to get married?
My mum, yes. (Laughs) She’s always asking me “Eh, you play golf with so many guys, none of them good catch meh?”.
She’s always asking, but that’s the thing about me: the more you want me to do something, the more I don’t want to do it. (Laughs) I’ll tell her I’m not ready because I just got out of a relationship.
Did you lean on your family and friends during your break-up?
We got together almost two years ago, and broke up recently. I didn’t lean on my family ‘cos they really liked him, and we were on the way to marriage. The topic was always brought up.
I didn’t tell my family because I didn’t want them to worry. I wanted them to see me going through it healthily and not like, you know, just crying and stuff like that. I did tell them we broke up, but in front of them, I acted like it didn’t affect me as much as it really did.
That one was pretty painful ‘cos I tried to overcome my emotions alone. When I confided in my friends, it wasn’t me being sad or crying, it was more like, ‘Come on man, talk me out of this’.
That must have been a tough period for you.
It was very hard because when I was going through the whole emotional roller coaster, I was actually shooting this show. It was a very tough time for me but I feel like the experience made me stronger.
Did you use work as a distraction?
It was not a distraction and I didn’t want to use work as a medium for me to avoid what I was dealing with. So what I did was… if you understand my character’s story, she also experiences a lot of emotional roller coasters, so I incorporate my real emotions into the story.
There are a lot of emotional scenes, and I did the majority of them in one take.
So what we see in the show are your real emotions?
Yes… I’m actually quite nervous to watch it myself. When I confided in my friends, when I told my family, I didn’t cry. I wanted to be like, ‘I’m fine, it’s just another relationship, I’m fine’. You know?
But when I used my work to pour out my emotions, it was so genuine that sometimes I got a shock afterwards and it would take me a while to contain myself. After the whole scene was done, I needed to take a breather, to get my shit together. (Laughs)
Was Tyler worried when he saw you so sad on set?
He’s very supportive lah, and it was nice to have his support. He knows when it happened, he was one of the first few people I told. I didn’t want him to misunderstand why I was acting… weird (chuckles).
Did you guys develop a close friendship then?
I didn’t know him at the start and we had to [play a married couple] who have been together for seven years. It’s not like the start of a relationship where I look at him with dreamy eyes. I needed to build a relationship with him.
So before we actually started filming, I asked if he wanted to go to couple’s yoga together, and he was like ‘yah, why not? Is there such a thing in Singapore?’. We started searching for classes, but we couldn’t find any, so we had to look at other options. I knew he likes to play sports, so that was the only outlet I thought we could use to bond.
I brought up the topic of couple’s yoga during one of our cast meetings and Juin [Teh] told me she’s a certified yoga instructor — I didn’t know that! She couldn’t give us lessons ‘cos of a contract thing, but she got her instructor to teach us. We had a three-hour private lesson, and there was a lot of skin-ship (watch snippets of their session in the IG video below).
The first time we went out together we were already all over each other ‘cos we tried to be comfortable with each other and [had put in effort] to build rapport and chemistry.