Ying toasts a tough role

Cherrie Ying Choi-yi hopes her latest role won't leave her career in a hangover.

The 23-year-old Taiwan-born actress rose, and occasionally had to stagger, to the challenge of playing a teacher who resorts to the seedy world of late-night drinking games.

'It was really hard to film the drinking-game scenes,' says Ying (right), who also stars in Jackie Chan's action comedy Rob-B-Hood. 'Unlike the mahjong and card-game scenes, where we can set up everything before rolling the camera, we had to remember every sequence of the drinking game and we needed to do it all over again for different shots.'

Ying's character in Lam Wah-chuen's Nothing is Impossible (which opens next Thursday) gets involved with the pub pastime after she's dumped by her boyfriend who takes up with a professional drinking-game competitor.

The part also required much improvisation, and although scenes were filmed after pubs were supposed to have closed, late-night revellers often stayed behind, wanting a piece of the action. 'You never know what a drunken person will do,' says Ying, who acted out the scenes in sobriety with co-stars comedian Dayo Wong Tze-wah and young action actor Andy On Chi-kit.

'Dayo came up with loads of ideas on set and we filmed several different versions for those scenes.'