My awkward moment: Sheila Sim

SINGAPORE — A lot of girls out there probably wouldn’t mind being fed potato chips by MediaCorp “duke” Romeo Tan; but if you ask Sheila Sim, who stars alongside the actor in the supernatural comedy Mystic Whispers, that activity makes for a major awkward moment.

In the Toggle web series, they play two people who don’t get along, but eventually team up to help needy ghosts — played by guest stars such as Yuan Shuai, Michelle Tay, Aloysius Pang and Brandon Wong in not-quite-runway-ready makeup — with their unfinished business. Predictably, Sim and Tan’s characters eventually end up falling for each other and demonstrate their affection by feeding each other chips. It was a scene so soppy that it made Sim shudder.

“We had to act so in love and it was so funny because everyone on set was holding their breath waiting for ‘cut’ and then they all burst out laughing. Everyone was like, ‘I’m going to throw up!’ On screen, it doesn’t look too bad, but in real life, we were trying so hard to make it look like we were so in love,” she said.

Not that she’s adverse to Tan, but she explained: “In real life, we are very good friends, so we’ll talk, but we won’t do intimate things. And everyone on set knows the both of us and that we’re not that sort of people.”

In fact, Sim had a far more intimate relationship with the pair of headphones she’s always wearing in the drama, which led to more awkward moments for her.

“I’d put them around my neck and when they called ‘action’, I’d put them on,” she said. “There were a few times when I forgot. Most times, they caught me before the scene went too far, so I could redo that shot. But once, I completely forgot and the whole scene was filmed.”

When she realised it at the end of the scene, “it was a struggle between telling the truth or just keeping quiet and letting it pass”.

But she eventually ’fessed up. “There was silence. At that moment, time stood still and everyone was looking at one another. They were probably thinking, ‘B****!’.”

But it might have been the headphones that suffered the most. “Romeo’s and my outfits are all very thick ... It was quite unbearable some days because it was exceptionally hot. With the headphones on my neck all the time — you can imagine how bad it was at the end of it. They sure smelt of me!”

Mystic Whispers is available free on toggle.sg.