SINGAPORE – He may not look like Superman, but when it comes to saving people on a film set, Mark Lee is quite the superhero. At least in the movie, Everybody’s Business.

In one of the sequences, Lee stopped a black board from falling onto co-star Gurmit Singh during filming. (We were later told that the board was actually made of Styrofoam, so the actor was never in mortal peril at all - but it’s the thought that counts.)

Lee attributed his response to his “quick reflexes”, even though neither he nor Gurmit had any memory of the incident. The 45-year-old said he is particularly observant of his surroundings when he is working on set, and can count a camerawoman and co-star Wang Lei among the people he has saved.

“When we were filming Being Human, we had a fight in the movie, and he fell down. I saw that there was an upturned axe behind him, so I quickly pulled him up,” Lee said.

“Even though I believe some people are not worth saving, it’s a life after all,” he jokingly added. “We save cats and dogs, we can’t possibly not save useless people.”

Since Everybody’s Business is a comedy by film-maker Lee Thean-Jeen about public hygiene, we asked members of the cast to share their most awkward toilet memories.

Wang Lei, who plays the owner of a coffee shop, said he once had to “go” in a plastic bag in a car in between getai performances.

His on-screen wife, Liu Ling Ling, said she also had to answer the call of nature in public – covering herself with just a tarp, during her time as a getai performer. “What to do? It was raining, I couldn’t go out and didn’t have an umbrella,” the 50-year-old said, explaining that she couldn’t get her hair and costume wet mid-performance. “I think Heaven would have taken pity on me, because I was peeing in the rain, and no one would have known the difference anyway.”

Lee, who plays a boot-licking civil servant in the movie, met a fan who wanted to shake his hand, while he was using the urinal.

“The two of us were standing next to each other peeing, and he said, ‘Hi, Mark, how are you?’ So I said, ‘Hi, can we shake hands after we wash them?’”

As for Kumar, who plays Minister of Toilets, said some people get into a conundrum when he uses the loo. “When I use the ladies’ toilet, the ladies are actually very comfortable with it. When I use the men’s toilet they are like, ‘Why are you here?’ One day I was coming out of the gents, when one uncle was coming to the gents, he saw me and went to the ladies.”

But when it comes to horrible toilet stories, the grand prize goes to Gurmit Singh, who plays a strait-laced civil servant in Everybody’s Business. “I was having diarrhea, and I was looking for a toilet. And the reason why I was looking for a toilet was because I was painting my new home - my first home. (So) I rushed down to the coffeeshop (and when) I went to the toilet, opened the cubicle and there was poop everywhere! Not just there, but on the floor, on the three walls, behind the door as well. I don’t know what exploded there.

“It was so disgusting that my diarrhea, that was almost coming out, sucked up by itself again. My diarrhea was so traumatised by what I saw, that my belly shut down.”

Everybody’s Business opens on Dec 5.