Singapore actor Fir Rahman's career has been going places since he played a conflicted prisons officer in the award-winning local psychological drama Apprentice (2016).
He received a Best Newcomer nomination at the Asian Film Awards and impressed a casting director so much that he landed a role in the upcoming sequel to action comedy Polis Evo, the highest- grossing Malaysian film of 2015.
He will play a special forces police officer and has been travelling to Kuala Lumpur weekly for gun training.
Fir, 36, tells The Straits Times: "I've got a lot to thank for as it opened doors for me. This year has been really good for me."
He can be seen soon in Love In Transit, an original StarHub production of 10 short films featuring the different modes of transportation in Singapore as backdrops.
The entire series will be available on StarHub Go tomorrow along with Timescapes, a collection of five standalone animated short films which includes Singaporean Ervin Han's award-winning 16- minute The Violin (2015).
Also making its premiere tomorrow is the StarHub-commissioned 30-minute Paper House (2017), which features the traditional Chinese craft of making elaborate paper offerings for the dead.
It is an adaptation of Paper City by Singaporean novelist Dave Chua and comic artist Koh Hong Teng.
These programmes are part of a roll-out of home-grown content by StarHub in the run-up to National Day.
All local shows are available for free on StarHub Go and there are more such commissioned offerings in the pipeline after Aug 9, including telemovies and infotainment shows.
In the eight-minute #Kindness from Love In Transit, Fir plays Alan, who sees a man making a scene at a bus stop one rainy night. He is about to teach the drunk a lesson when an elderly woman's kind gesture stops him.
The actor himself has not been taking public transport regularly for the past 10 years as he drives. But he still remembers an incident from his secondary-school days.
It was after Friday prayers and he was with a group of eight friends and they were playing about on the upper deck of a bus, "running from the front to the back and throwing our songkok and catching it".
They were eventually given a tongue-lashing by the driver.
It is a story that still gets told at gatherings even though the incident took place more than 20 years ago. Fir has since gone from mischievous student to in-demand actor.
His career had an auspicious start when he won the Best Actor/Presenter award in Suria's talent search competition Juara in 2002. All this while, he has been juggling projects across different platforms.
Earlier this year, he treaded the boards in character-driven drama Harap (Hope) by Teater Ekamatra as well as Toy Factory Production's Prism, about the cost of urban redevelopment.
He has also been shooting the second season of Channel 5 television drama Lion Mums.
But he remains partial to the stage as that was where he started out back when he was a student in Temasek Polytechnic.
Fir says: "At the end of the day, when the audiences clap, when they give you that energy, you get the rush of the live stage, it's indescribable."
