Married couple Nick Teo and Hong Ling play love interests in the new crime drama No Other Way – which they admitted, ironically, was “awkward”.
Hong Ling, 31, told AsiaOne in a recent interview: “For me, I thought [the experience] was quite awkward. There were a lot of people on set and I’m already not the most comfortable with filming intimate scenes.”
While the extent of their on-screen intimacy was just a cheek peck, Nick, 37, added: “Maybe they think because we’re husband and wife, we can be naturally intimate with each other but actually in front of so many others, it’s pretty awkward.”
The couple met in 2014 while filming the Channel 8 long-form drama 118 and began dating in 2015. They got married in December 2023 after eight years of dating.
In their new drama, Nick plays ace detective Shuheng whose apathy unsettles his colleagues. Hong Ling plays Shuheng’s adoptive sister Keying, a prosecutor who was taken in after being abandoned by her biological family as a child.
While solving crimes and uncovering wounds of the past at work, they begin to navigate romance together – one which they never allowed themselves to address before.
Upon seeing this storyline, we were highly intrigued and had to ask Hong Ling and Nick: what was it like to portray such a forbidden romance?
“When I first read it, I thought it had a K-drama feel to it. Shuheng and Keying grow up together and even though they’re adoptive siblings, so not blood-related, to me it has a dreamy feel,” recalled Nick.
“But a lot of people told me they felt that it’s not appropriate, because although the characters aren’t related, they still grew up together.”
Hong Ling vehemently disagreed: “For me, I really cannot accept it. Since young I’ve had a lot of close friends and we grew up together, so I really cannot imagine myself falling in love with them. It’s just weird!”
At home, they would debate over their characters’ relationship, with Hong Ling arguing for Nick to imagine himself and his siblings in Shuheng and Keying’s position.
Playing a role lacking in emotions
As the series progresses, Shuheng is diagnosed with alexithymia, a personality trait characterised by difficulty in recognising and articulating emotions.
Nick admitted that Shuheng has been his most challenging role to date because of how complex it was to play him on screen. “As an actor, we want to portray emotions most of the time but with him I have to suppress it. At the same time, I had to let the audience know what he was feeling,” he explained.
He added that instead of expressing Shuheng with pure, flat emotions, he thought to delay them instead – such that every time other characters talk to him about feelings and relationships, he would come off as unaware rather than having “no emotion”.
As someone who has a high level of empathy, Nick felt that the one thing he had in common with Shuheng was their logical way of thinking, which ultimately helped him get into the role.
He revealed that he initially auditioned for two roles: Shuheng, and another which he thought better suited him. However, he knew that Shuheng was more challenging for him and wanted to try it in the end.
Hong Ling, on the other hand, did not audition but had been in Taiwan filming a drama co-production See You at 11pm when she received the offer for Keying. Recounting the moment, Nick said: “I was in Singapore playing pickleball and then she called me to say she got the role and I was like, ‘Huh, it’s you?!'”
A moral dilemma
Keying and Shuheng are involved in solving crimes of passion – oftentimes gruesome – involving circumstances of lovers, families and even parasocial obsession.
One particular case sees a man prosecuted for murdering his wife after taking her off life support when she suffers from cancer.
It left a deep impression on Hong Ling, who was brought back to her own memories: “It wasn’t necessarily murder – he put his wife’s life to a stop because he loves her and didn’t want to see her suffer any longer. It made me think a lot. Do I really love this person, such that I’d kill her?
“I actually thought of my mum as well, because she had cancer and I thought if I was seeing her suffer, could I really bring myself to kill her to stop her suffering? But it’s very difficult.”
In February 2025, her mum died aged 52. She had been diagnosed with advanced stomach cancer in May 2024.
Nick’s time as Shuheng also had him looking back on his relationship with his own estranged father. In the drama, Guo Liang plays the latter’s stern dad.
On Mother’s Day this year, Nick dedicated a heartfelt Instagram post to his mother which revealed that his father had left the family when he was in secondary school.
“I used a bit of that past experience for this drama because since young, I had always found it hard to communicate with my father,” Nick confessed. “Shuheng and his father are the same, though it’s because Shuheng operates differently from other people and his lawyer dad is someone who wishes his son could be as successful and eloquent as him.
“However, Shuheng is someone who doesn’t really talk and once he does, it’s all about logic and numbers and not about how well-spoken he actually is.”
Nick added that his father had kept in contact with him and his siblings after the divorce prior to his death.
Overall, the sombre cases didn’t dampen the couple’s mental health, as they were both too busy with work. Particularly for Hong Ling, she has been involved in multiple back-to-back projects since 2025 including The Spirit Hunter, In His Hands and See You at 11pm.
She stated that she was only able to have “tiny little breaks” spanning a few weeks or a month at a time, but even during those periods she would have to start preparing for her next project. “I’d be doing all the boring stuff [on my breaks] like playing with my cats, watching movies and taking care of my plants. I’d just live, ” said Hong Ling.
Cute couple content
A quick look at Nick and Hong Ling’s social media pages will show their frequent couple videos, which are likely to leave your heart warmed.
A Reel which they uploaded in May playfully chronicles their sleep habits, with Hong Ling wide awake and glaring at a Nick dozing beside her despite the alarm going off. “The alarm is set for you to wake me up,” he quipped in the comments.
In another video, which received 8.7 million views, Nick is depicted as an extrovert interacting with groups of people while Hong Ling sits alone with a dazed expression. The caption read: “Behind every friendly husband is an introvert wife who is scared to talk to everyone.”
Most recently, the couple documented their trip to China where they conquered Hong Ling’s fear of heights through skydiving and also dressed up in ancient garb to have dinner for Nick’s birthday.
So who’s the mastermind behind the cute content?
“The ideas mostly come from Hong Ling. She’s my social media manager. Filming is also by her and so is all the editing,” said Nick, proudly.
Hong Ling happily told us it was a “very conscious” decision to make the videos.
“We decided to do this together because I wanted to do social media. In the past, actors only posted nice pictures. I don’t want to be a boomer and I want to do something for my career.”
She felt that Instagram was a good platform for marketing and for future clients to work with them. They also highlighted that they were initially unable to nail down the right direction when they were doing lifestyle-centric videos, like cooking.
A closer inspection of some of these couple videos depict Nick being held at Hong Ling’s mercy, much like she’s ‘bullying’ him.
Admitting that the dynamic on the reel is slightly exaggerated, their real life is a little more straightforward.
“In real life, I’m a bit slow, a bit of the gong-gong (clueless) kind,” said Hong Ling. “He’s a lot faster, so I’ll just follow him. But I realise sometimes, I have to walk very fast to catch up to him.”
No Other Way, which also stars Yvonne Lim, Pierre Png, Cynthia Koh, Zhang Zetong, Tay Ying and Sheryl Ang, is now airing every weekday at 9pm on Channel 8 and is available on demand on Mewatch in both PG and M18 versions.
Apart from No Other Way, the couple also star together in In His Hands.
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kristy.chua@asiaone.com
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