In a recent interview with AsiaOne, local actress Rebecca Lim spoke about her experiences returning to her first drama in three years.
Her appearance in Mediacorp’s English series Aunty Lee’s Deadly Delights also marks her first role in a long-form drama, which took nine months to film.
“[The duration was] just right I’ve heard of long-form dramas that lasted for three to five years, like Tanglin. Right now, that’s unimaginable to me,” the 39-year-old expressed. “But since I hadn’t worked on anything for about two and a half years, this was a good warm-up to get back into the swing of things.”
Rebecca, who married corporate manager Matthew Webster in November 2022, announced in September 2023 that she was four-and-a-half months pregnant and delivered a baby boy in January. .
She previously appeared in local thriller film Confinement which premiered in October 2023, and recorded two seasons of her talk show With Love, Becks, which telecast in 2022 and 2024.
With production company Weiyu Films and its founder Lee Thean-jeen (TJ) behind Aunty Lee’s Deadly Delights, Rebecca told us she could not pass up the offer to return to work, which included leaving her son behind at home.
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“I’ve never said no to TJ’s productions, because he was the first director to give me my very first lead role — so there’s that trust between us. It was a very easy ‘yes’,” said Rebecca.
In the drama that’s based on the book series by Singapore author Ovidia Yu, she plays Cheryl, a low-profile social media manager who works for Aunty Lee’s (Vernetta Lopez) renowned Peranakan cafe.
Over time, Cheryl becomes romantically involved with Noel (Pierre Png) who eventually becomes a high-profile Member of Parliament. When they marry, public scrutiny strains their bond.
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At a set visit to Aunty Lee’s Deadly Delights in June 2025, Rebecca told AsiaOne: “Their love is fraught with challenges, from getting to know each other and entering the relationship. For a public figure like Noel and a low-lying person like Cheryl to come together, having their love life be at the mercy of so much public criticism and judgement by strangers was very tough on her.
“The entire process of acting out this relationship with Pierre made me appreciate my other half in real life more, because I realise that he’s always handled everything so well. With his very easygoing character, you might undermine the stress that he’s probably under, simply because he’s just not showing it.”
Coincidentally, like Noel who is of Eurasian ethnicity in the drama, Matthew is half-Chinese on his mother’s side and half-British on his father’s.
“He grew up in Singapore and is Singaporean, and completed national service,” Rebecca explained. “It doesn’t feel like I’m really in an interracial marriage. It just felt like I was marrying a Singaporean boy.
“Maybe on the outside he doesn’t look Chinese, but we do share many values which I appreciate now that we’ve started a family, like filial piety and respecting elders.”
‘We didn’t even want to look at each other’
Rebecca also told us she was surprised by the emotional rollercoasters in Cheryl’s story in what she thought was just a “lighthearted family drama”.
The cast was not given the full script when production commenced, but as it progressed, they delved deeper into their characters’ challenges.
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“There was a period of two weeks when Pierre and I had to constantly film all our emotional scenes,” she recalled. “Every day, we had to wipe the smiles off our faces. We didn’t even want to look at each other on set, because we wanted to conserve all our energy for our performance.”
Remarking that she could not bring Cheryl’s negative energy back home, Rebecca coped by practising compartmentalisation. “I feel like work is work, and home is home — even more so now that I’m a mother,” she explained.
“It’s important that I have that precious time, so I made the conscious effort to leave any negative emotions in the car before I enter the house; that has always been my working style.”
‘If the universe allows us to expand our family’
Last November, she revealed on social media that she was four months pregnant with her second child. In a separate Instagram post by her good friend, makeup artist Shaun Lee, where she surprised him with the news, she remarked that mentioned that she initially wanted to stop at one child.
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Rebecca explained to us that her initial reluctance was because her first birth had been “quite traumatic”, consequently taking her a long time to return to showbiz work. As a work-driven individual, she found difficulty settling into a new equilibrium between her career and motherhood.
Secondly, she struggled to lose her postpartum weight.
“I’m not built like other mothers who lose their pregnancy weight in a few months — I almost took two years to lose mine,” said Rebecca. “That made me slightly scared of repeating the entire process again — because after all, I’m in the entertainment industry.
“However, after partnering with aesthetic clinic BMF, I gained some confidence and help to get back into shape. From there, I started to entertain the idea of seeing if the universe allows us to expand our family.”
So how does Rebecca’s son feel about being an older brother? To help the two-year-old better grasp her pregnancy, Rebecca does a nightly ritual with him: “Before he goes to bed, I ask him to touch my tummy and sit with me.
“I tell him that ‘Mummy and baby love you, and you must love baby,’ so while I doubt he understands, I’m curious to see how this changes as he ages.”
As a middle child herself, she foresees sibling rivalry in her growing family.
She reminisced: “No matter how loving parents are, there will definitely be tension, but this builds bonds between siblings. I used to fight a lot with my sister and brother when we were younger, but we all grew up to be really close.”
Aunty Lee’s Deadly Delights, also starring Sheryl Ang and Norman Ishak, airs Mondays to Thursdays on Channel 5 and is available on demand for free on Mewatch.
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