Relentless reporter
In this week’s episode of FRONTPAGE, Nell Ng gets to play private investigator in a murder mystery.
ACTRESS Nell Ng says her character Lulu is a very determined journalist who uses all sorts of resources to get to the truth on the television drama series FRONTPAGE.
In this week’s episode - titled Lights, Camera, Murder - Lulu, a senior writer with the entertainment desk at newspaper The Voice, investigates the accidental death of an actress on a film set. Said actress was filming a drama series’ finale in which her character gets shot, but instead of blanks, real bullets were fired and the result was fatal. While the blame immediately falls on the props guy, Lulu believes there’s a lot more than meets the eye. And she’s all set to find out what that is.
Ng adds that besides murder, screams and a whole lot of investigating going on, viewers will also get to see how Lulu partners up with Rebecca (Nurakhtar Mohd Amin), looks for clues and pieces together the puzzle to see the real picture. “She doesn’t give up easily.”
Ng says that playing Lulu has allowed her to peek at a journalist’s lifestyle - including the long hours they put in before a story is actually printed, the places they go to and the people they talk to. While Ng says that like her character, she does not give up easily, Lulu is a far more serious individual. “She likes to jeling (glare) a lot,” says the actress with a laugh. “And she likes to see Nerina frustrated just because she’s young and the daughter of a Datuk.” (Nerina is the character played by Cheryl Samad on the series.)
Nell Ng plays the jounalist
everybody loves to hate, Lulu
Chia, in investigative TV drama
FRONTPAGE.
Things couldn’t be more different on the set though. Ng knew all the cast members of FRONTPAGE except for Nurakhtar before coming onto the project. “It has been a rewarding experience, being able to work with friends and knowing that I am in the good hands of director Kabir Bhatia. Kabir knows exactly what he wants; he’s an actor’s director, someone who makes sense of what you are delivering ... he really helped me, I am from a theatre background where expressions are always bigger, and he helped me become as natural as possible (for television).”
Ng theorises that the popularity of the show is due to it being very Malaysian and more importantly, that it goes behind the scenes of a newspaper to show how a story could arrive at the front page.
Ng, who is a writer herself and has written a couple of shows and is writing a monologue based on her life, admits that it is the front page of a newspaper that catches her eye every morning. “I look at what the important news items are before flipping over to the entertainment pages, comics and horoscopes. I then see what’s happening around the world and sometimes read the sports pages because it has good pictures of sportsmen,” she reveals. laughing. “I sometimes read the business sections, too. I read everything. I like to read the comedy court ... the exchange at Parliament.”
FRONTPAGE airs on ntv7 on Sundays at 10pm.
