Try presenting the concept of a completely blank calendar to Nicole Lee Wen, and you will watch a sharp, analytical mind briefly short-circuit. The 27-year-old actress and writer genuinely struggles with the idea of downtime. When asked what she’d do with a completely free day, she pauses for a long, uncharacteristic beat. “Everything that comes to mind now somehow relates back to work,” she admits sheepishly while laughing at herself. “Like, I want to do this activity because it will help me with that project. I know I shouldn’t think that way, but I do.”
It is a striking bit of self-awareness, and one could even say that her internal motor simply runs at a higher RPM than the rest of us. To be perfectly honest, Nicole is inherently kinetic: She is affable, sharply articulate, and speaks at a rapid pace that only slows when the conversation turns introspective.
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“I don’t want to say ‘down to earth’ because that feels a little bit pretentious,” she says, cutting through the defensive veneer that usually coats actors during interviews. “But what you see is what you get. When I show up, I bring 100 per cent of myself.” That complete lack of pretence extends directly to how she carries herself day to day. “I love wearing dresses, but I realise I always need a touch of fierceness to things,” she notes, reflecting on her personal style philosophy. “I like fashion that looks feminine but feels masculine. It gives me a sense of strength, like an armour that I wear each day.”
It is a philosophy that translates effortlessly when she steps under the studio lights. Dressed in Dior’s fall collection, she has an unmistakable sense of purpose, and on set, moves easily between collaboration and performance. She takes directions well, offers ideas, and instinctively responds to the camera. Between takes, she returns repeatedly to the monitor, scrutinising each frame before stepping back to the floor.
This same intense focus allows her to manage a current schedule that would break most people. Over the past few months, her life has been a relentless jigsaw puzzle of overlapping timelines. For instance, she recently wrapped filming for Mediacorp’s upcoming long-form English drama Oh Captain, My Captain, which is set to drop around National Day, where she plays a role that required an entirely foreign kind of stillness.
“I play a low-key psychopath,” she says, her eyes widening with excitement. “I have a lot of scenes where I just stand, and I don’t blink. So now my talent is apparently not blinking at people when I talk to them.”
At the exact same time, she is pulling intense night shoots for Zhou Gong Jiang Gui, a Chinese-language horror micro-drama spin-off starring veteran radio DJ and actor Dennis Chew. In whatever hours are left over, she also runs Bite Size Pictures, a digital production company she co-founded to write and produce vertical 9:16 content.
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Her choice to build a company around short-form vertical storytelling wasn’t a casual pivot to a trend, but a deliberate move to reclaim creative agency. “As an actor, a lot of times we wait for people to cast us. We wait for opportunities,” she explains candidly. “But I realised I can create my own opportunity. When I first started writing, it was really born out of a desire to act, and nobody was giving me roles. So I decided to write roles for myself.
“These days, everyone, including commercial clients, is looking for short-form video content,” she notes. “It’s a very high-demand market, but not a lot of people know how to do it well. So we wanted to combine our storytelling skills with this format.” The sheer velocity of her career makes it easy to forget that none of it was part of the original plan. A self-confessed library nerd, Nicole spent her recess time buried in books because she was “too scared to go out and make friends”. She excelled academically and was expected to follow the familiar path: To become a doctor or a lawyer. A creative life simply wasn’t something she imagined for herself.
Everything changed while studying for her A-Levels. Nicole suffered a severe idiopathic anaphylactic attack and spent a month in hospital confronting her own mortality. “Once you almost die, you start questioning your life,” she reflects. “I truly understood the meaning of YOLO back then. I asked myself what the one thing I never had the chance to pursue, and it was acting.”
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Despite having never acted before, she began auditioning for open casting calls. The decision bewildered her extended family, who urged her to “wake up” and reconsider. Instead, Nicole landed her first film, Chasing Paper by Shoki Lin, which screened at the Busan International Film Festival and earned her a Best Actress nomination at the National Youth Film Awards (now known as the Singapore Youth Film Festival) when she was just 19. There was little looking back after that. She went on to study Theatre and Creative Writing in the UK, giving formal shape to an instinct she had already decided to trust.
That memory of being an obedient student hiding a massive, quiet desire to break out became the exact material she mined for her role as Vanessa in Siyou Tan’s acclaimed independent feature, Amoeba, which tracks four teenage girls navigating the authoritarian constraints of an all-girls school.
“Playing Vanessa was pure catharsis,” Nicole says. “I was an incredibly guāi (Cantonese for obedient) student growing up because I was terrified of breaking the rules. But Vanessa isn’t scared. She is bold and brave. Reliving those school days forced me to be kinder to my younger self. When you’re 16, your world is small. I learnt to stop criticising my past and just accept that the messy parts made me who I am today.”
What makes Nicole a rare breed in a highly curated industry, however, is her absolute refusal to choose a single lane. She rejects the precious, insular rules of the prestige film circuit that suggest an artist must choose between high art and fast entertainment. Her recent digital romantic comedy, One Year Love, paired her with South Korean reality TV breakout star Park Min-Kyu from Single’s Inferno. It was a pivot that surprised industry purists.
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“A feature film is a marathon, but a micro-drama is a daily sprint,” she explains, defending the format with a writer’s logic. “People look down on fast entertainment, but it’s like poetry. When you write a novel, you have infinite space to play. When you write a poem, every word, every line, every frame matters. Micro-dramas are visual poetry. You have to capture a human connection in 120 seconds.”
If playing a psychopath demanded emotional restraint, her next role tested something else entirely. Performing dramatically in Mandarin proved to be one of the biggest hurdles of her career.
“I grew up Chinese-speaking because my grandparents raised me, but through the education system, I lost it,” she says candidly. When she was first pitched the horror project, the feedback was bluntly clear: Her Mandarin simply wasn’t up to par for a dramatic role. But telling her she can’t do something is usually the fastest way to ensure she does.
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“I told them that I will make it happen,” she recalls with a sharp grin. “So, I had Mandarin tuition and spent hours looking in the mirror, reading lines to myself. Acting and emoting in a language that isn’t your most natural takes a lot of practice. But I don’t want language to be a barrier when it comes to taking on characters.”
Beneath her easy charm and quick wit lies a deeply disciplined physical core. Nicole holds a black belt in Taekwondo and used to compete nationally. This, she says, informs the effortless way she controls her body on set. Her ultimate dream role is a sweeping wuxia period drama—the Chinese genre of honour-bound martial heroes—a fixation rooted in an adolescent love of its world-building.
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“I grew up watching shows with strong female roles who hold swords and fight people, and I’ve always wanted to fight people,” she says with a big laugh. Her absolute touchstone for that physical, high-stakes storytelling was Avatar: The Last Airbender. When a recent high-profile live-action adaptation rolled around without her name on the casting list, she recalls jokingly asking why she hadn’t received the call “to be on a martial arts set, holding a sword, saving the imaginary world, and the greatest kingdom.” Naturally, that fantasy pairs perfectly with a desire to tackle a role like Mulan, which was her absolute favourite Disney movie growing up.
Right now, she is already moving on to the next chapter, co-writing a new feature film with a Malaysian director, with a shoot planned for next year. When asked if people in the industry try to force her to pick a single lane between writing and acting, her posture straightens. “I get this all the time,” she says. “People ask me whether I’m a writer or an actress, as if you have to pick one. Ben Stiller does both. Jason Godfrey acts and runs a production house. I don’t see anything wrong with doing both, as long as I’m giving each capacity my all.”
Perhaps that refusal to be boxed in is what defines her most. To her, creativity isn’t diminished by taking different forms because any form of being an artist is valid. “You don’t have to be full-time to call yourself an artist. If you have a practical job, but you write poems on the weekend, you are as valid an artist as I am. Every desire of creation is worth pursuing.”
Makeup Artist RICK YANG/Artistry Studios using Dior Beauty
Hairstylist KEN HONG/Evolve Salon
Photographer’s Assistant EDDIE TEO
Stylist’s Assistant NAZIRA LUBIS