After nearly three decades of cameo roles, Singapore actor Andi Lim has earned a Best Supporting Actor nomination at the 63rd Golden Horse Awards, the most prestigious honour in Chinese-language cinema. The nominations were announced in Taipei on October 1, with the ceremony set for November 22 at the Taipei Music Center. The 53-year-old was nominated for playing Lim Boon Kiat, a hawker father, in local director Anthony Chen's We Are All Strangers.
The film, the closing chapter of Chen's Growing Up trilogy after Ilo Ilo and Wet Season, scored seven nominations in total: Best Narrative Feature, Best Director for Chen, Best Leading Actress for Yeo Yann Yann as Lee Bee Hwa, Best Supporting Actor for Lim, plus Best Makeup and Costume Design, Best Original Film Score and Best Film Editing. Lim will compete against Hong Kong's Anson Kong, Tenky Tin and Berant Zhu, and Taiwan's Akira Huang. Singapore cinema earned a record 15 nominations across five films this year, with Ah Girl and The Violinist joining We Are All Strangers alongside two short films. The film has also been selected as Singapore's official submission for Best International Feature Film at the 99th Academy Awards, the third of Chen's films to represent the country at the Oscars, following its competition premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival.
For Lim, the nomination caps an unlikely journey. He began acting in 1998 after placing second runner-up in the men's category of Star Search 1997, in the same batch that brought Yvonne Lim, Florence Tan, Vincent Ng and Evelyn Tan into showbiz. Since then he has been the quintessential supporting player: Yin Zhiping in Return of the Condor Heroes in 1998, Cai Qingyang in Hainan Kopi Tales in 2000, Mingjie in If Tomorrow Comes in 2024, and Yes Captain! in 2026. His role as Boon Kiat marks his first-ever leading role and his feature-film debut.
He landed the part through an old connection: Mediacorp actress Hong Huifang, who had been his acting teacher during Star Search 1997. The casting director for We Are All Strangers, who had also cast Huifang's 2022 film Ajoomma, got Lim's number from the actress. Lim recalled being told that Boon Kiat was a hawker who didn't have to be good-looking, which gave him the confidence to audition. In the film, his widowed Hokkien mee stall owner Boon Kiat courts Bee Hwa, the brassy Malaysian-born beer promoter played by Yeo Yann Yann, who has now received Golden Horse recognition for all three films in Chen's trilogy. For an actor who spent 28 years in the background, the nomination is both vindication and a reminder that in cinema, as in hawker centres, the most satisfying stories are often the slow-cooked ones.