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The resurgence of actor Chin Han, Singapore’s man on the moon

The Los Angeles-based actor talks about his journey to Hollywood, and why Scarlett Johansson is a good fit for an ‘Asian’ role

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Chin Han stars as Commander Jiang in Independence Day: Resurgence

Published: 12:00pm, 14 Jul 2016Updated: 5:54pm, 14 Jul 2016

HIS CURRENT BIG-SCREEN outing, as the moon-based Commander Jiang in Independence Day: Resurgence, sees Chin Han desperately battling an alien invasion. Back on Earth, however, the 46-year-old is fighting jetlag, following a whirlwind few months promoting the new Hollywood blockbuster before filming his next movie, Ghost in the Shell, a live-action adaptation of Masamune Shirow’s manga franchise, alongside Scarlett Johansson.

Clad in a crisp blue shirt, a remarkably fresh-faced Chin Han (he has dispensed with his family name: Ng) strolls in, right on time, to Los Angeles’ plush Beverly Hills Hotel, where we’ve arranged to meet. He gives little indication that, in the past few weeks, his work has taken him from LA to Hong Kong, Beijing and New Zealand (not in that order).

Home for the Singapore-born actor is “for all intents and purposes here”, he says, referring to LA. “But I have worked on movies that have required me to be on location for extended periods of time. So, strangely enough, I’ve been here since 2007 … but I’ve really lived here half that time.”

It was The Dark Knight (2008) – the comic-book adaptation directed by Christopher Nolan and starring Christian Bale as Batman – that first brought Chin Han to Hollywood and, more importantly, out of a self-imposed eight-year hiatus from acting following a successful TV career in Singapore.

“After I did television, I just felt I didn’t have any more to give to the medium,” he recalls. “And so I went back to the theatre and started directing and producing, and found I enjoyed it as much, if not more, than acting.”

He spent the intervening years working on plays and musicals in Singapore and New York, but made only two appearances on screen: in TV mini-series AlterAsians and the Thom Fitzgerald film, 3 Needles, alongside Lucy Liu and Chloe Sevigny.

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