Local thespian Jo Tan on the struggles and anxiety of an actor
She also shared with Yahoo Southeast Asia how talking about mental health and burnout was now more acceptable these days with the changing culture.
For mainstream audiences, Jo Tan is probably a familiar face - although one might need to see a photo to be reminded of her.
That’s not on her, though. It’s more of the fact that on local television shows, Tan rarely plays a lead role; instead filling the shoes of a myriad of supporting characters that sometimes, tap into her comedic talents.
The casting pattern isn’t lost on her, as Tan openly addressed the elephant in the room - her looks and behaviour aren’t lead-character material.
In an interview with Yahoo Southeast Asia on 10 Aug for her play King (which ran from 10 to 13 Aug), Tan recalled how she used to be “neatly categorised” into roles such as grandmother, mother, or “funny best friend”.
She said, “I guess I'm just never going to be good enough to to be a lead role because lead characters don't look like me. They don't talk like me. They don't act like me.”
Though Tan pointed out that “roles and performance are constantly evolving, especially for people who present as women”, a part of that typecasting experience still stays with her.
I think part of that conditioning and just the way people talk to me were also just that, oh, actually, I do not fit the archetype of a womanJo Tan
In King, her one-woman show that she also wrote based on her experiences, Tan got to explore the idea of gender identity and that was liberating for her.
She explained, “When the idea of, like, I don’t have to identify as a woman came out - I don’t know if it’s a label I’ll necessarily adopt, but when those options came out, that was hugely liberating to me. You mean, I don’t have to live up to all these things that people have told me I’ll never live up to? That, to me, was just the ultimate freedom.
“Strangely enough, after those possibilities opened up for me, I felt better about myself, I felt more confident. I felt I could tell stories about myself and these stories were worth listening to. I felt more attractive because there's no fixed standard that I have to live up to.”
“I can ‘femme’ up if I want and I feel damn good about myself, or I can just be, ‘Hey look, I got abs’ and cut my hair really short,” she added with a laugh.
Tan said the discovery of gender identities made her realise that she could “define myself on my own terms and it's still a journey that I'm going through”.
Though she is questioning the need to put a label on herself, she relishes the fact that she doesn’t have to stick with the one she was born with.
“Just that option being open to me, it just makes me go, like, this is great. I feel so much better.”
Constant anxiety of being an actor in Singapore
Though Tan has been seen on local productions like Code of Law, Jalan Jalan, Tiong Bahru Social Club, and Sisters of the Night (the Last Madame prequel), being an actor isn’t entirely smooth sailing.
She said, “Being an actor in Singapore, it's just the constant anxiety because unlike a job with clear career milestones, you can be at the top of your game Monday, and then the next day, people think that you're irrelevant.
“And then you have to try and brand yourself in a certain way. And then people will judge you for the way you try to brand yourself. So there's no winning. It's very hard, because your success is constantly being assessed by everybody around you on the street.
The benchmark, according to Tan, of whether you’ve made it in Singapore? When people recognise you on Channel 8.
She shared, to much laughter, of how people say they haven’t seen her on Channel 8 before and she had to assure them that she has.
“Everybody's constantly judging your worth as a performer lah. So it’s a bit hard but it’s okay,” she shared.
Burnout is ‘more tolerated now’
As for the recent wave of local celebrities’ admission of burnout, Tan theorised that talking about mental health and burnout is “more tolerated now”.
“People are more understanding that it's possible to burnout. It's not a judgment on you that you are merely human.”
Tan added, “The culture’s changed. I had a friend who’s a Fly [Entertainment] artiste who used to be told ‘Whenever you go out in public, can you put on your makeup properly? Can you not take so much public transport?’
“And now it’s like be real, be real, be real. TikTok loves real. So the pop culture has changed. Now we want authenticity. You know, I think it’s good in some ways. People can lean into that and say ‘I am human, I have my challenges’.
“Of course, people also capitalise on that. But I don't think that if you come out and say you’re burned out that that's capitalising on it. And I think it's great that we are celebrating humanity.”
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