Award-winning actress Yeo Yann Yann on a life in character and coming full circle in Anthony Chen’s ‘We Are All Strangers’

Bee Hwa’s courage echoes that of the other women Yeo has played for Chen, though each expresses her strength differently. In Ilo Ilo, she portrayed a mother holding her family together through the Asian financial crisis while pregnant during filming. The experience allowed her to explore herself “as an actor, as a human, as a woman”. In Wet Season, she played a Mandarin teacher whose gentleness concealed formidable resolve. “In her heart, she is strong as a mountain,” Yeo says. “The way she replied to the world was so gentle.” Bee Hwa has that same inner strength.

The role extends a creative relationship that began with Ah Ma (2007), which received a Short Film Special Distinction at the Cannes Film Festival that same year. Yeo auditioned to play the youngest daughter in a family keeping vigil at a hospital. Chen told her everyone would cry except her: “Sometimes sadness doesn’t need to be expressed with tears.” On set, the director—then still serving national service—asked whether she could produce a single tear from her left eye. She could promise tears, she replied, though the eye remained beyond contractual certainty.

Beneath the anecdote lies the rigour that has defined their work. During her Ilo Ilo audition, Chen repeatedly asked Yeo to make the performance “smaller”. When she protested, “If it’s even smaller, I cannot act anymore,” he answered, “That’s exactly what I want.” The exchange challenged her understanding of screen acting: how life might appear when performance recedes. His precision was exacting, yet it created the conditions for instinct.

For We Are All Strangers, preparation was a collective effort. The principal cast—including Regene Lim, who plays Lydia, Junyang’s girlfriend—rehearsed over meals, sometimes continuing without Chen and sending him videos of scenes that stretched indefinitely. Yeo invited Lim into her coffee-shop studies, allowing familiarity to accumulate away from the camera. Such meticulous work reflects a career grounded in theatre training and enlarged through television, Singapore cinema and international productions.

A two-time Golden Horse Award winner—Best Supporting Actress for Ilo Ilo and Best Leading Actress for Wet Season—Yeo has built a career spanning Singaporean and international productions. Her credits include Woo Yen Yen and Colin Goh’s Singapore Dreaming (2006) and Royston Tan’s 881 (2007), followed by the HBO Asia series Invisible Stories, which earned her an International Emmy nomination. She has since appeared in Modern Love Mumbai (2022), American Born Chinese (2023) and Gareth Evans’s action thriller Havoc (2025). Her roles often centre on women shaped by contradiction: mothers who protect yet falter, caregivers holding fragile homes together, and outsiders forging their own forms of kinship.

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Chen’s films helped widen that path. After Wet Season travelled through the festival circuit, Yeo was recommended to Vishal Bhardwaj, who was casting “Mumbai Dragon”, his episode of Modern Love Mumbai, and needed an actress who spoke English and Cantonese. The role required much of her dialogue in Hindi. Yeo worked with two coaches, rehearsed with a school junior and spent months preparing for ten days of filming. “It was a disaster at the beginning,” she recalls. Yet the challenge only deepened her enthusiasm. “I love immersing myself in a character. I love acting. It’s so hard, but so much fun.”

Her bond with Koh carries another measure of time. He was 11 when they met for Ilo Ilo in 2012. Yeo introduced herself simply: “Hi, Jia Ler. I’m Mummy.” During Wet Season, when their characters became teacher and student, she reset the terms. “Call me Yann Yann. I’m a professional actor, you’re a professional actor. Let’s work.” In We Are All Strangers, she encountered a young man asking questions, observing relationships and taking ownership of his craft. “Jia Ler has grown so much,” she says. “His sensitivity has really come through.”

Their shared history gives the film an intimacy beyond performance. Chen first encountered Koh after meeting some 8,000 children in his search for Ilo Ilo’s young lead. Yeo first met Chen as a director in army uniform. Over the trilogy’s 13-year span, Chen entered fatherhood and his forties; Koh grew from boyhood into adulthood; and Yeo became a mother while continuing to challenge herself as an actress. “They were involved in every important turning point of my life,” she says.

As We Are All Strangers premiered in competition at the Berlinale this February, opened the Hong Kong and Udine film festivals, and screened in Sydney and Shanghai, Yeo watched audiences respond to a Singaporean world. Some cried for its characters; Singaporeans travelled hours to screenings and emerged missing home. Others left curious about the country. “There’s a human level of connection in the film,” she says. Its HDB landscapes reveal Chen’s attentiveness to Singapore’s harsh tropical light, turning ordinary spaces into an emotional record. The local detail resonates because the need for dignity, connection and family is universal.

Yeo sees that international recognition extending across Singapore cinema, as filmmakers and performers build careers between local and overseas projects. She wants domestic audiences to meet that ambition equally and hopes to portray a historical figure—a woman who helped change society and would demand a different form of research and responsibility.

Every character, she says, begins with the demanding process of becoming acquainted, first with another person, then with herself. “It’s always fascinating for me. It’s always painful, but it’s also rewarding.” We Are All Strangers may close Chen’s trilogy, yet Yeo resists treating those 13 years as a sealed chapter. “Fate brought these hardworking people together,” she says of Chen, Koh and herself. “The years we’ve spent together have meant so much to me. I don’t want it to end, but perhaps this could be a new beginning.”

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