Having toiled silently at TVB for 18 years, Deno Cheung (張松枝) is best
known for his villain roles, which he started playing back in 1999 when
he portrayed the role of a spoiled, rich young master in the series
Plain Love II (茶是故鄉濃) – since then, that ‘spoiled young master’ image
stuck with him and had become his ‘specialty’ role of sorts over the
years. Fortunately for him, audiences seem to like and appreciate Deno’s
villain roles – when fans bump into him on the street, they ‘chide’ him
for being ‘such a bad person’ [referring to his characters in the
series], but yet at the same time, they have smiles on their faces. This
little bit of ‘recognition’ can be attributed to the years of hard work
and effort that Deno put in to building his career. At one point, Deno
reveals his experience of almost going into shock while filming a
particularly strenuous scene, yet at the end of the day, he endured it
with all his might and successfully completed the filming.
Deno Cheung entered the industry when he was 20 years old. He recalls
how he was swimming at a beach in Shek O one day where, coincidentally, a
commercial was being filmed – the PA (production assistant) went over
to him and asked if he wanted to participate, and just like that, his
filming career began. In those first few years, Deno filmed commercials
for all sorts of products, including toothpaste, M&Ms, real estate,
etc. During the height of the karaoke craze in the early 90s, Deno
switched to filming karaoke MVs (music videos) – in 4 short years, he
filmed close to a thousand MVs and got the opportunity to work with some
of HK’s most popular singers at the time, such as Kelly Chen (陳慧琳),
Cass Pang (彭羚), etc. Deno recalls those early years with fondness: “Back
then, we filmed 4 days a week and sometimes, we would even travel
offsite to various locations.” Asked about his experience filming the MV
for music queen Kelly Chen’s hit ‘Care Too Much About You’ (對你太在乎),
Deno smiled and praised Kelly’s down-to-earth personality: “I remember
how much she loved talking about food! During filming, she would
constantly ask what we would be eating for lunch and where we should eat
when we got off work!”
No pay raise for 12 years
It turns out that filming MVs was actually only a ‘side job’ for Deno –
his ‘real’ job was in mechanics: “My friend had a company that
specialized in buying second hand cell phones from Japan, refurbishing
them in HK, then selling them in Mainland China -- since I had studied
mechanical engineering, I was the one responsible for refurbishing the
phones. It wasn’t really a full time job, so I still had time to film
MVs on the side.” So with 2 salaries coming in, life must have been
worry-free then? With a slight smile, Deno replied: “Worry-free? Of
course not -- in fact, the work was quite arduous! Later on, I joined a
certain company [TVB] and in a few years, that ‘double income’ was
gone.”
In 1994, through a friend who worked behind-the-scenes at TVB, Deno was
introduced to the station’s manager of the artists’ department at the
time, Hsiao Siu Ming (蕭笑鳴). [TN: 蕭笑鳴 left TVB not too long after
Virginia Lok took over the Artists’ Department in 2004; she is the wife
of TVB’s production head Tommy Leung (梁家樹) and the mother of TVB actress
Toby Leung (梁靖琪)]. After meeting with ‘Ba Jeh’ (Hsiao Siu Ming’s
nickname), Deno signed with TVB and with that, started his 18 year
‘relationship’ with the company. Deno expressed that his early years
with TVB were the happiest – at one point, he was practically filming
non-stop and participated in so many series that he was able to
accumulate over 290 ‘shows’ in one year! However, all of that changed in
2000 when, during the filming of the series Gods of Honour (封神榜), TVB
held up Deno’s schedule for 7 months, yet only had him film for 3 days –
as a result, Deno didn’t have enough ‘shows’ to fulfill his contract
and had to rely on his meager salary from previous months to survive.
Luckily, the next year, producer Lau Shi Yu (劉仕裕) invited him to
participate in the series Country Spirit (酒是故鄉醇), which allowed him to
‘recover’ the lost wages. Deno revealed that for 12 years, he was never
given a pay raise, which definitely made life difficult: “Luckily, I
consistently had work and was very careful about spending money – at
least eating the boxed lunches at TVB helped me save a lot of money on
food!”
Filming action scenes in extremely hot weather almost sent him into shock
As the saying goes: ‘One minute on stage takes ten years of
practice/hard work (台上一分鐘,台下十年功) – this has definitely been true in Deno
Cheung’s case. Deno expressed that from the moment he joined TVB and
filmed his first series, he was already ‘learning’ from the many
experienced artists he collaborated with – one of those artists was
actor Michael Tao (陶大宇): “Back when I participated in Detective
Investigation Files 2 (刑事偵緝檔案II), I got the chance to work closely with
Michael practically every day. Every time we had scenes to film
together, I would practice by looking through the script and try to
memorize all his lines, then imagine myself filming the scene in his
position – when it came time to actually film the scene, I would observe
the way Michael did it and see if there were any similarities with the
way I practiced it – this was my way of learning. After that, I started
doing the same thing with every series and slowly, it helped me learn a
lot about acting – more importantly though, it also helped me develop a
good memory. I remember back when I filmed Eternal Happiness (再生緣), I
had a scene with Raymond Lam (林峯) where my character had 5 pages of
dialogue – we did that scene in one take! Another time, when filming a
scene for Country Spirit with Paul Chun (秦沛), my character had 3 full
pages of dialogue for that particular segment. At first, I thought that
since I was somewhat of a ‘newcomer’ at the time, Paul Gor wouldn’t pay
much attention to me, but then, as I was practicing that particular
scene with the director, Paul Gor heard me reciting those 3 pages of
dialogue practically in one breath – when he noticed me practicing that
scene, he immediately told the people around me to keep the noise level
down so that I could concentrate. Seeing him do this truly made me feel
very happy in my heart!”
In one of his last series with TVB, 2012’s Three Kingdoms RPG (回到三國),
Deno played the historical character of Zhao Zi Long (趙子龍) – his
performance was very well-received by audiences. Deno expressed that
even though he already knew going into it that the character wouldn’t
have much screen time, it was still important for him to do the best job
he possibly could with it: “The action choreographer told me that at
the end of the day, I’m the one in front of the audiences and so how
much effort I put in to doing the action scenes, the audiences will
definitely notice. The 2 days that we spent filming those scenes were
very grueling and arduous. Coincidentally, that was also the time when
the extras [temporary workers] went on strike – originally I was told
that there would be 50 extras filming the scenes, however when I
arrived, I found out that there were no extras at all due to the strike.
Therefore, the production team had to call around last minute and
eventually were able to find 10 students from the acting classes and 5
stuntmen to serve as extras – since we would have to re-use the same
people as extras in the other scenes, we couldn’t have the cameras focus
on them too much, so the cameras ended up being focused more on me and
showing them fighting in the background with their backs toward me. This
meant that I would actually have to be the one ‘fighting’ the entire
time – throughout the filming, I felt like I had ‘died’ 4 times because
we were filming outside under extremely hot weather with heavy costumes
and armor. In between some of the fighting sequences, I would have to
rest for 5 to 10 minutes to catch my breath and drink water – it was so
strenuous that I almost went into a state of shock! I ended up drinking 8
bottles of water just filming those scenes alone!” Looking back now,
Deno expressed that even though the filming was exhausting, the memory
of that collaboration was a happy one, as he was able to work together
with the production team to overcome the difficulties and finish the
scenes.
In many of the series he participated in, Deno often played similar
characters: the spoiled young master, the chap who betrays his triad
boss, and other similar ‘villain’ characters – towards this, Deno
laughed and stated: “Sure I would like to play other types of characters
such as comical ones for example, but it rarely happened. Actually,
come to think of it, producer Poon Ka Tak (潘嘉德) helped me a lot in the
beginning, as he was the one who initially gave me the ‘good guy’ roles
to play, such as the ones in Rural Hero (離島特警), Untraceable Evidence
(鑑證實錄), The Awakening Story (婚前昏後), etc., but later on, even he started
asking me to do villain roles too…haha! In terms of the ‘spoiled young
master’ character, producer Lau Shi Yu (劉仕裕) was actually the first one
to have me play this type of role back during Plain Love II (茶是故鄉濃) –
from that time on, I continued playing that role.” Even though Deno did
play a lot of typecasted roles, at least his performances were
well-received by audiences – in fact, a netizen recently suggested that
Deno should get together with other ‘known villains’ [artists who
regularly play villain characters in series] such as Timothy Cheng
(鄭子誠), Ricky Wong Chung Tong (王俊棠), Wong Man Piu (黃文標), and Cheng Kar
Sheng (鄭家生) to film a ‘battle of the villains’ series: “Hey, if you send
the idea to HKTV (CTI), there’s a huge possibility it might happen, as
there is a lot of flexibility with their series – it could be 5
episodes, 10 episodes, even more! Since there’s 5 of us, we could do a 5
episode series and it would only take 1 week to air!”