Elvin Ng and Rebecca Lim start their shifts

SINGAPORE — Elvin Ng can’t even take care of himself. Rebecca Lim dismembered her stuffed animals as a child.

So it’s just a tad ironic that the two actors will be playing nurturing nurses in the medical drama You Can Be An Angel Too, which will air on MediaCorp TV Channel 8 in January.

The cast, which also includes Zoe Tay, Xiang Yun and Bryan Wong, turned out for a lensing ceremony yesterday to mark the start of filming.

Ng, who plays a software engineer turned nurse, confessed that the role was going to be something of a challenge. “I’m not very good with my hands or doing household chores. I can’t cook, I can’t do housework. I don’t know how to take care of people. I don’t even know how to take care of myself, really! Like when I’m away filming, if breakfast isn’t provided, I won’t have breakfast,” he said.

“So, my challenge now is to look the part. There are so many procedures that I have to learn: I have to look convincing and at the same time deliver my lines — I think it’ll be quite difficult.”

But, at the very least, he quipped: “Hopefully I look sexy in uniform, lah.”

Is Lim, who plays an Advanced Practice Nurse specialising in geriatrics, going to be a hot nurse, too?

“As much as I try, I don’t think I can be hot,” she laughed, adding that the uniform she wears is a little too comfortable. “There’s so much excess cloth — probably, after three months, I’ll have put on a lot of weight, because you don’t feel it.”

She added: “I think it’s a very noble profession and to be able to portray that and hopefully inspire even one person to be a nurse — I think that would be great.”

Playing a medical professional, she said, is like living her childhood dream. “Ever since I was nine, my only ambition was to be a doctor.”

But nine-year-old Doctor Lim probably violated the Hippocratic Oath. Instead of putting band-aids on her soft toys, she cut them up.“I’d like to think I was a surgeon!”

Catch You Can Be An Angel Too starting on Jan 5, weekdays at 9pm on MediaCorp TV Channel 8.