15 Things To Know About Beloved Local Actor Pierre Png

Add "radio DJ" to Pierre's already impressive resume. The actor joined Gold 905's morning show beginning Jan 20, 2025, which he co-hosts with Mike Kasem and Vernetta Lopez. The programme happens every Monday and Tuesday between 6am to 10am. Pierre will only come on from 8am onwards. "This opportunity came knocking on my door and my managers thought it'll be good to try something new… Plus, I have fond memories growing up listening to the different radio stations."

Acting, though, is still his first love, he insists.

Pierre Png began acting in 1998 in the musical film Forever Fever before scoring the role of Phua Chu Beng in the iconic English sitcom Phua Chu Kang Pte Ltd a year later. A few years later, Pierre Png made the cross into Mandarin television and has starred in many recognisable productions, including Holland V (2003), Portrait of Home (2005) and The Journey: A Voyage (2013). More recently, he starred in I Do, Do I? (2023) and Moments (2024).

Since winning the talent search competition Fame Awards in 1998, Pierre Png has added multiple acting accolades under his belt. In 2014, he clinched the Star Awards Best Actor win for The Journey: A Voyage. Then in 2022, he was named the national winner for Best Actor In A Leading Role at the 2022 Asian Academy Creative Awards for his role as a lawyer in This Land Is Mine, a post-World War II drama.

He has worked in Hollywood

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We can’t talk about Pierre Png’s achievements without mentioning his work as Michael Teo in the Hollywood movie Crazy Rich Asians (2018). Likewise, we can’t talk about his role in the movie without mentioning this shower scene (above).

Fun fact: Pierre Png wore a skin-coloured thong and trained for weeks to shoot that scene.

Perhaps, Michael Teo wouldn’t be Pierre’s first and last Hollywood role. It was reported in 2021 that he signed with agencies Luber Roklin Entertainment and Gersh for representation in the USA. With this move, we could see more of him in other Hollywood productions.

In 2020, Pierre Png made his directorial debut when he directed the television series The Right Time. Speaking about the opportunity, he added that being a director has helped him learn to see things from different perspectives, such as managing the budget and limited shooting time while wanting to give room for actors to develop the character.

In 2002, his now-wife Andrea de Cruz suffered from liver failure after consuming the Slim 10 weight loss pills. In a move that made headlines, Pierre Png donated part of his liver to her in order to save her life. This also happened to be the first liver transplant involving a non-related living donor that was approved by the Ministry of Health. On the decision, Pierre Png shared that it was a no-brainer as he “couldn’t see my life without her.”

In 2021, Pierre and Andrea opened the restaurant-bar Tipsy Flamingo in Raffles City. The beach-themed concept is an offshoot of the Tipsy Collective. Prior to this, Pierre co-owned the 3O1 Bar & Kitchen at HomeTeamNS Sembawang, which shuttered in 2020.

Earlier in Feb 2022, Pierre Png shared with 8days that he had reconnected with a primary school friend while playing a game called DomiNations. He was chatting with a teammate who happened to have a former classmate named Pierre Png. The actor tricked him and after some laughs, the two reunited.

Prior to the Circuit Breaker (2020 to 2021), Pierre Png was actively involved in the Land Rover Owners Singapore car club. Together, they teamed up with the Willing Hearts organisation to help deliver food to homes.

On helping others, Pierre shared “It did open my eyes to the living conditions of some people. Sometimes a door would be open and you take a peek inside and see that there are some who are not as fortunate as you are. So there’s always a warm and “cold” or sad feeling when doing charity. You count your blessings, but at the same time you also want to do more. I believe life is meaningless if you just hoard everything and don’t share what you have with others.”

At the beginning of 2023, Pierre Png joined fellow artistes, such as Elvin Ng and Ayden Sng, to celebrate Chinese New Year early with the elderly. The event took place at two senior daycare centres operated by the Home Nursing Foundation. Together, they sang, tossed yu sheng, and participated in other festive activities. 

After needing to learn ballet to play a professional ballet dancer for the show The Gentlemen (2016), Pierre Png fell head over heels for the art form despite initial hesitation. In fact, he loved it so much that he continued learning it after going through a crash course for the show.

“I continued dancing ballet because I’m such a perfectionist. I wanted to do a nice pirouette. You can do it for TV because it’s edited, and you can do it again. But I want to, at the snap of a finger, do a pirouette, or just some of the routines that I could not achieve in one take. Looking back, I think I was afraid (at the start) but the more affirmation I got from my instructors, the more I felt free. It felt really good to achieve those poses and movements. It was addictive. It’s a lot better than saying my lines in Mandarin!”

ICYDK, Pierre and Andrea have two dogs. Their fur babies are adopted Shih Tzus, one named Oreo and another Cookie. The couple both grew up with dogs — he had an Alsatian and Doberman, while she had an Alsatian and Mastiff.

In a 2018 interview with Her World, Pierre Png discussed not having children: "Andrea and I have actually accepted that we will not have children of our own, and we are not close to adoption. We also have so many nephews and nieces that we are not searching for a way to have children of our own. Besides, we already have a very happy family, it’s just that our kids are ones that walk on all fours."

For starters, Pierre Png stood alongside names such as Michelle Yeoh, Constance Wu, and Henry Golding for Crazy Rich Asians. Then, in 2022, he met K-pop singer CL when she came to Singapore for a Cartier event. That same year, Pierre Png travelled to Busan for the Asia Contents Awards, where he and fellow actor Richie Koh grabbed the chance to take a photo with South Korean actress Park Eun-bin, who was fresh from her Extraordinary Attorney Woo fame.

Have you ever seen someone get possessed? Well, Pierre Png did during his national service days. "When I was in the army, one of my platoon mates got possessed right before my very eyes. We went out for an exercise and when we came back at night, he just wasn’t behaving like himself." The same person was seemingly possessed again months later, but Pierre could not bring himself to ask if he was actually possessed.

His second brush with the supernatural occurred in Thailand. "When I was filming in Thailand and was staying in a hotel, I was pressed down on the bed [by a spirit] and it 'molested' me. It squeezed my calf, all the way up to my groin. The next moment, I felt like I was being vacuum-packed into my blanket. I couldn’t move or speak. I mustered all my strength and prayed. It felt so real." The experience was enough to prompt Pierre Png to travel with holy water and to "make the sign of the cross whenever I enter hotel rooms."

This article was originally published on Dec 12, 2022 and updated on Feb 2, 2025.