For Janet Hsieh, hosting a TV lifestyle show is a cakewalk compared to acting.

“When you’re hosting, you’re just being yourself,” says the 40-year-old Taiwanese-American who’s best known as the bubbly presenter of TLC’s Fun Taiwan. Acting, on the other hand, is an entirely something else.

“With acting, you’re trying to be somebody completely different — you still need to be a real person, except you’re not being Janet,” she tells 8days.sg and other press from Taiwan via Zoom recently.

Hsieh — who has Egan, three, and another child due next month, with English-Malaysian actor husband George Young — is currently starring in the eight-part HBO Asia rom-com series Adventure of the Ring, which premiered on Sunday (Dec 13).

“I did the travel show for so long that when the audience see me on camera, they only see Janet,” says Hsieh who hopes that perception will change after Adventure of the Ring. “I really wanted to make sure that when people see Rossy, they see Rossy, and forget you’re watching Fun Taiwan Janet.”

Adventure-seekers: Janet Hsieh with her ‘Adventure of the Ring’ cast-mates — (from left) Chris Wang, Allison Lin and Huang Shang-Ho — at the press con in Taipei on Dec 8.

Here’s what else she has to say about the show…

/You don’t see Rossy until Episode Six.

But you do hear her voice throughout the show. That’s probably why she was cast, Hsieh suspects: “I guess I kind of have a recognisable voice, especially when I speak Mandarin, because I have a little bit of an accent, just enough that people can tell [it’s me].”

The Texas-born Hsien relished the opportunity to play a radio DJ because she got to ad-lib her lines and play with her voice. “You have the (animated, goofy voice) ‘Hello, everybody!’ kind of DJ. Then you have the (switches to sultry voice) ‘Hello, tonight you’re going to be listening to Mariah Carey…’” she says. “I really discussed this with the director and we finally found the voice for Rossy.”

/ Her character is an enigma… for now.

When asked about her most challenging scene in the show, Hsieh is keeping it close to her chest. “All I can say is that you have to watch till the end — please, please, please — because all my best scenes and all the biggest surprises all come towards the end. It’s all a build-up to those scenes which, as it turns out, were to be my most challenging scenes.” The challenge, she says, is to make Rossy real and multi-dimensional. “I want you, when you see her, to understand and sympathise with her. I think there will be people who don’t like Rossy. I also think there will be people who completely understand Rossy but still hate her. I think there’ll be people who love Rossi because they’re like, ‘Yes, that’s me!’ or ‘That’s a person I know!’”

/Motherhood has made her a more empathic actress.

“When you become a parent, the amount of sacrifice that you give for your family, your child, is a feeling that I had never experienced before,” says Hsieh, whose recent acting credits include Netflix's supernatural drama The Ghost Bride and Home, an award-winning short film co-starring her husband.

“When you actually have a child, something clicks in your head that’s just, Wow, okay, I need to protect him and with that comes a lot of the ups and downs. Sometimes you just want to leave the kid somewhere because you’re, like, ‘Ah! Just stop crying!’ But on the other end of that, you love him so much that it almost hurts.”

Hsieh credits parenthood for expanding her imagination “10 times of what it was”. She adds, “Because you imagine all these scenarios — good and bad — that your child might put you in, and you’re able to tap into those emotions when you’re acting.”

/She has a good acting teacher by her side.

Does Hsieh run the scripts by her husband George Young? (At the time of the interview, he’s away in Los Angeles.) “Unfortunately, yes,” Hsieh says with a chuckle. “He is such a good actor that it’s sometimes very frustrating for me because I’d be reading scripts and when I get stuck on this one line for whatever reason, he will look at it really quickly and he’ll show me what to do. Which is even more annoying because I’m like, ‘How come you can do it and I can’t?’” She adds, “He’s able to give me advice without even realising that he’s giving me advice. I’m very grateful for his help. He has helped me a lot with auditions, script-reading, and even script-writing. He’s very good. But don’t tell him I said that!”

/Adventure of the Ring reminded her of a funny story from her Antarctica wedding in 2015.

Has Hsieh ever misplaced any wedding jewellery like the characters in the show did? Yes and it happened when she was getting ready for her nuptials in the Antarctica (which was documented in an episode of Fun Taiwan: All-Stars Special). “Because we were [embarking on this epic road trip [to Houston, Buenos Aires and Antarctica], we didn’t want to carry around a lot of jewellery,” Hsieh recalls. “So I had a friend, [actress] Chang Chun-Ning, to, pick up my diamond necklace — on loan from a jeweller — and wedding ring and bring them from Taiwan directly.” But mere hours before her flight, Chang called Hsieh to tell her that she had ‘lost’ the necklace.

“Everybody started freaking out,” says Hsieh. “So we called the jewelers, ‘Haha! Hehe! Guess what? Hmm, we lost your half-million-dollar necklace’ and they responded, incredibly calmly, ‘You know what? Don’t worry, your flight’s in an hour or two, let me get you another necklace so that you have something to wear, and we will find the necklace somehow, somewhere.’ So they loaned us another necklace, and Jun-Ning basically put it in her underwear [in the suitcase] so there was no way she going to lose the necklace this time.”

Did they find the original necklace? “We later found out that it had somehow slipped underneath the driver’s seat, ” says Hsieh. “It was very random. I don’t know how it slipped under there, but eventually they found it and everything was good.”

/She plans to ring in the New Year in a fun way.

“I was jokingly asking, ‘Why didn’t anybody ask me to host the [New Year’s] countdown?’ Because I’m ready to do it,” says Hsieh. “But one of the responses was that there’s a lot of fireworks so they’re afraid they might set off my labour,” she says, laughing.

“We are probably just going to chill out or we’re actually — because I can’t stay still, I can’t really just stay in one place — thinking about a camping trip in the middle of nowhere and kind of celebrate the New Year that way, just do something a little bit different.”

Did she just say “in the middle of nowhere”? And what if the baby pops out? “I know! Well, George better be ready to catch the baby!”

Adventure of the Ring airs Sun, HBO Asia (Singtel TV Ch 420 & StarHub Ch 601), 8pm. It’s also available on HBO Go.

Photos: HBO Asia, George Young/Instagram, Janet Hsieh/Instagram