Local actress Cheryl Chou recently faced the toughest challenge in her acting career, playing a woman whose husband died just one month into their marriage.

Speaking to AsiaOne recently while promoting her new drama Devil Behind The Gate, the 29-year-old shared it was the first time she played a character with heavy emotions.

"I broke down in tears almost every day while I was on set," she said.

Cheryl plays Fang Aixin in the series, who grew up in a wealthy single-parent family. Her head-in-the-clouds personality masks her loneliness and desire to seek dependence and affection. When art teacher Yuan Yingcai (Desmond Tan) appears in her life, providing her with comfort and support, she realises for the first time that she can be happy and loved.

However, just a month into their marriage, Yingcai dies by suspected suicide. When his identical brother Yingjie (also played by Desmond) returns to Singapore from France to take care of his afterlife matters, he realises there is more to Yingcai's death than it seems, leading him to work in the art school to uncover the truth and finding out Yingcai's twisted and extreme nature in the process.

While Cheryl admitted she is "quite an emotional person" in her private life, she is a tough cookie at work.

"It takes a lot for me to cry, to show this kind of frustration and emotions," explained the winner of Miss Universe Singapore 2016.

"I was very nervous [about performing this role], which was why I decided to engage a performance coach so she could guide me to 'melt' into the character and to make sense of what is going on in the scenes that I needed to do in the first week of production, which was very helpful."

On her first day of filming last May, she acted in a scene where she had a total breakdown and the coaching that she had beforehand helped her to perform better.

Cheryl had just completed filming the local film A Good Child prior to starting work on Devil Behind The Gate. To get into her role, she cut her waist-length hair to below her shoulders.

She shared: "I wanted a change for myself and for the characters, so I did a massive chop [of my hair]... The transition [from one project to the next] was quite swift, which for me was quite unusual. Usually, I would have a couple of weeks to digest everything."

She told her manager she would like to focus most of her time and energy on playing Aixin for the following three months of production and to reduce other work appearances.

"That was the first request I made, which is quite out of character for me. But this was such an emotionally heavy show, especially for my character who faces many changes in her life, and she is not the most emotionally strong person. I told my manager I needed that period of time to do my homework and recalibrate myself after every filming day," Cheryl said.

Theme song for the character

To prepare herself for scenes where Aixin has an emotional outburst, Cheryl assigned a "theme song" — French composer-pianist Erik Satie's Gymnopedie No.1 — to herself to get into the mental state.

"I felt that this musical piece basically captures the emotions and the mood of the series. When I did my homework on the script, I would include this piece and also play it in my mind while acting," she shared.

To her, the composition and Aixin were so deeply connected that she couldn't listen to it again after filming the series without being reminded of what Aixin and Yingcai experienced together.

"I didn't expect to fall so deeply into the character... I was just trying to wipe out everything that I am while playing Aixin," Cheryl said.

'Why did I sign up for this job?'

The character's turbulent experiences took a toll on Cheryl, especially during the last month of filming last August.

"There was one day I just felt unwell in my stomach, like I was going to throw up. There was a kind of uneasiness and I felt like I was sick, but I was actually not. It was just too much of an overload in my head," she shared.

She also remembered going home physically drained.

"There was one time when I returned home, I just laid on the floor and looked at the ceiling, thinking, 'What am I doing with my life? Why did I sign up for this job?'" she recounted.

Despite that, after watching some clips from the drama and speaking to the producer, she was happy bringing her character to life.

Coincidentally, Cheryl and her family visit her grandfather in Melbourne every September to celebrate his birthday, and she took the chance to unwind there for a week after filming wrapped.

She shared: "It was a nice break from everything that had transpired the last three months [of filming]. I just let myself go and be there. I didn't realise how tired I was from this production until I got there.

"The weather is colder there and I usually like to run in the park and reservoir. I brought my running shoes for the trip, but I didn't run once the whole time I was there. I just couldn't get out. It was nice to have that distraction, but at the same time, I just realised how exhausted I was."

Devil Behind The Gate is now available on demand for free on Mewatch. It is also airing on Channel 8 on weekdays at 9pm.

yeo.shuhui@asiaone.com

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