Tony Leung Was Once So Overworked, The Crew Thought He Had Died When He Was Actually Sleeping

And you thought you were a hard worker.

On a recent episode of the talk show he hosts with Hongkong actor Louis Yuen, Wayne Lai recalled the days he had to straddle a few productions at a time and how he once didn’t sleep for four days in a row. (P/S: That's still one day less than Charmaine Sheh's record of going without sleep for five days when she was a TVB artiste.)

But as shocking as Wayne's story sounds, it was his anecdote about Tony Leung and how overworked the actor was in the early days of his career that stood out.

Wayne revealed that he had worked with Tony on 1989 TVB period drama Where Heroes Dare. Tony played a set of twins, which meant that he had more work than his co-stars as he had to act as two different characters. Being in most of the scenes also left Tony with very little time to rest.

According to Wayne, TVB then didn’t have a room for artistes to rest in so they would just sleep on the benches in the make-up unit in between scenes.

One morning, Wayne recalled, the crew were looking for Tony who was catching up on his sleep in the make-up unit.

When they found him, they saw him lying motionless on the bench, which shouldn’t be all that surprising since he was, you know, asleep.

But then they noticed, to their horror, that he was “foaming at the mouth”. In fact, that frightened the crew so much, they thought the actor had died.

Turns out, Tony was in deep sleep as he was just too exhausted from work and that the ‘foam’ was actually, um, drool.

Suffice to say, everyone on set was relieved to know that the actor was just dead asleep and not, well, dead. Though we wonder what Tony would feel about Wayne revealing this incident to the public.

Photos: Weibo