Troublemakers and nerds: The Lion Moms (and dads) recall their school days

Despite appearing to be the dream wife and mother with the dream family, the ugly truth is that Jennifer’s fairy tale marriage is falling apart thanks to her husband’s wandering eye for pretty young things. As with anybody in her situation, she tries desperately to try and get their relationship back on track, but it takes a toll on her – and portraying such a broken and pained character left such an impression on Bernice that she teared up while talking about it.

“The whole ride for Jennifer has been very emotional,” she said. “Even before I started filming and read the script, I felt so much for her on a two-dimensional level, on paper, right off the bat – she’s so real and I knew I would get attached to her.”

When asked if she drew from any real life experiences of wanting to mend a failing romance, Bernice replied, “Oh yeah, you have to, whether it’s from yourself or your friends. There’s no way you can think up feelings like that from nowhere. I think everybody has felt that way before.”

The last time we spoke to Bernice, she mentioned that making this show reminded her of the importance of finding a good partner in life. So what kind of man makes the cut for her?

“He has to like kids. It’d be tough if he didn’t want kids because I already have seven dogs! (laughs) And they have to like big families because my family is so big, whenever we have dinner gatherings we take up four tables.”

Since we were in a learning centre, we decided to give the Lion Moms cast a little blast to the past and get them to divulge what kind of schoolboys and schoolgirls they were back in the day. Read on for more:

Continued on next slide: Find out how the stars were like in school

Pictured: Vanessa Vanderstraaten, Nurul Aini, Bernice Liu

“I was probably what you would call an overachiever,” Bernice chuckled. “I was in a regular school, then I went into a program for gifted kids, then I did music, then I got a scholarship through university, so I was very studious. I was also competing in dance and taekwondo, then in university I joined kickboxing.” (Yes, Bernice, you are the standard definition of an overachiever.)

Nurul, on the other hand, was so skinny she had to go on stage and finish a bottle of milk in front of the teacher. “I was also very, very nerdy and had to wear very thick glasses from the time I was in primary three – I looked like a freak!” she exclaimed. Well, those days are clearly far behind the Suria star now.

Pictured: Fir Rahman, Nurul Aini, Dayang Nur Balqis

To our – and even their co-stars’ – surprise, Vanessa and Fir both used words like “quiet”, “timid” and “introverted” to describe their student selves – not quite how one would use to describe the bubbly entertainers if they saw them in action.

“I was a prefect and a really good girl all through primary one to six,” said Vanessa. “Then in secondary school, I was quite the wallflower, and I was failing my physics, additional mathematics and chemistry. My mom hired tuition teacher after tuition teacher and they got me from a 3/100 to a B3 for my O-Levels.”

She added that her mother was, indeed, a lion mom. “Her job is in the SAF (Singapore Armed Forces) so she’s very authoritarian: she’s like ‘When I say you jump, you ask me how high, don’t ask why or any other questions’. I’m going to try not to be like that to my future kids.”

For Fir, his turning point came when one of his friends secretly signed him up for drama auditions in his first year at Temasek Polytechnic. He went ahead anyway and… “I aced it with flying colours! That’s where it all started.”

Pictured: Russell Ong, Vanessa Vanderstraaten, Keller Teh, Joshua Tan

All right, to be fair to Russell, his shenanigans in primary school can’t really be labelled “naughty” per se: the former prefect was also a budding entrepreneur who went around selling handmade origami figures (no, not “herbal stuff” as Joshua cheekily implied). “I managed to make about $5 to $6 but the principal found out and I had to return everything,” he said.

Joshua, on the other hand, fully confessed to being a “rascal”. “I was not the best kid growing up and always got into trouble for stupid stuff like pulling girls’ hair, going into the girls’ toilet and cutting peoples’ hair,” he recalled. “I was always standing in front of the flagpole outside as punishment.”

He subsequently “matured a bit” in secondary school, but still did things like playing truant. “Other than that I’m a very good boy! I’m a really nice guy and everyone loves me… except for everyone in my school. (laughs)” Sure, Joshua.

Pictured: Max Loong, Alexandra Tan, Bernice Liu

Swiss-Malaysian entertainer extraordinaire Max says that ever since his school days, he was an “all-rounder” who “was good at a lot of things, but never the best at something” (in other words, a self-professed jack of all trades, master of none). “I was one of the loudest kids in class, but not the naughtiest,” he said.

But his most dramatic incident as a student happened really, really early on: in kindergarten. “I remember when I was about Alexandra’s age, I was locked out of class because I’d been naughty,” he recounted. “So I ran towards this glass panel and wanted to pretend to hit it, but I didn’t stop on time and the glass shattered. That was a very bad experience.”

We’re glad he survived the ordeal.

Click through for more pictures from the Lion Moms press conference and for some stills from the series:

Vanessa, Alexandra, Dayang, Keller and Joshua.