EVERYBODY SAYS that Andy Lau Tak-wah is the hardest-working star on the Canto-circuit which is probably why, judging from his press cuttings, he's always either late for his interviews or conducts them in the middle of the night after his concerts. This one was scheduled for lunchtime, but no sooner had the photographer and I arrived at the industrial building in Tokwawan where he has a whole floor of offices, than his staff merrily greeted us with the news that he was delayed. The dentist, apparently.
Also the 'flu. The prospect of a wheezy, mumbling interviewee rather threw a damper on the excitement of meeting a real live Canto-king.
We were placed in a conference room which contained a variety of photographs of Andy, looking sculpted and mean, and an array of the eyewear he has been designing over the past couple of years for a Japanese company called Masunaga Optical and which are available (PR plug coming up) at your nearest Optical Shop outlet. Everyone ran around obligingly providing refreshments and taking food orders. I asked if I could watch a video of Andy in concert, seeing as I'd never attended one, and after some fiddling, he leapt into view strolling up and down the Great Wall surrounded by men waving red flags. Next moment, he was lying in a bed out in the street during what looked like a black rainstorm, then he was alternately fondling a girl and shouting at her.
What was noticeable was how he looked about 19 one minute (kissing the girl) and at least 20 years older the next (the yelling sequences). I think it had something to do with his hair - when he sweeps it forward, he looks like a puppy and when he slicks it back, he's a hawk and, in my opinion, altogether more sexy. Anyway, as we were troughing down the char siu bau and rice and rather enjoying this hirsute speculation, the puppy incarnation strolled into the room, sat down and immediately looked expectant so I had to think up a searching question.
Which hairstyle do you prefer, Andy? 'I like my hair back,' he said, not sounding mumbly at all. 'But the audience, they want me to look young and bright. I like moody and sentimental. I got my ears checked this morning' - hmm, he'd evidently gone for an entire medical overhaul - 'and they wanted to have my date of birth, and my assistant hesitated to write down '1961'. It's not a secret. I can accept it, people around me are getting older too.' In fact, yesterday was his 36th birthday. There was a pause when I asked him what he wished for the future. 'I never think about it, er, good health,' he began. 'Wife,' murmured his capable managing director, Faustina Lin, who was sitting at his right hand. 'Oh yeah, get a wife, a beautiful wife,' Andy went on. I announced, severely, that beauty was more than skin-deep and he should be looking for a woman of soul, and he said, 'Yeah, I know, but I like both.' He grinned, 'And I want four children, two boys, two girls, so that they can talk to each other. It's hard for girls and boys to talk, they have different thinking.' Lau himself is the fourth in a family of six which he said was fine because if one of his three older sisters hit him, he had two younger siblings to thump. When he was 20, he enrolled on TVB's Artist Training Course with a group of friends. He wanted to be a scriptwriter but after three months, they told him he should be an actor. Was this a terrible blow? 'Yes, but it's good news for the fans,' he replied, an ironic gleam in his eye.
His sense of the absurd is pretty well developed. When his mobile phone rang, he lifted his eyebrows and sighed: 'My fans.' His first ever fan was a little girl who wanted an autograph but when he asked her what his name was, she had no idea - she'd simply recognised him from a television series. After that, he thought he'd better practise his signature and he executed some swirly loops but now he says that that flourish is growing less and less complicated: 'Ten years from now, it will just be a dot.' I said that I couldn't quite grasp this Canto-compulsion to leap from acting straight into the recording studio - after all, when was the last time you heard a record by Ralph Fiennes? - and he said: 'Money. I had no money and I had to earn.' He did some backing-sessions and dancing in Hong Kong clubs before, eventually, hitting the big time although it's generally agreed by those in the know (i.e. Chinese magazines) that it has taken him much longer than the other royals - Jacky Cheung, Leon Lai and Aaron Kwok - to be crowned. Hence the reputation for being hard-working.