Nicholas Tse Ting-Fung

Nicholas Tse Ting-fung arrived as a teenage pop star. He debuted as a singer in 1996 and moved into film almost immediately, which in Hong Kong at the end of the nineties meant youth pictures and triad melodrama: Chan Ho Nam in Young and Dangerous: The Prequel, Jack in Gen-X Cops, Sword Hua in A Man Called Hero. He was cast for the face and the fanbase, and the early performances know it.

He fixed that with impact. Tse learned martial arts for the screen and kept practising, and the run through the 2000s is one long argument that he could take punishment on camera better than anyone of his generation: Frank Cheng beside Jackie Chan in New Police Story, Tyler in Tsui Hark's Time and Tide, the rickshaw puller Ah Si in Bodyguards and Assassins, a station officer in the fire drama As the Light Goes Out. The Hong Kong Film Award for Best Actor came for The Stool Pigeon, where he plays an informant with the star gloss stripped off entirely.

Since then he has run several careers at once. He is a producer and entrepreneur and a television chef, and the cooking feeds back into the films: Cook Up a Storm is a kitchen drama that exists because its lead can genuinely cook. He still shows up for the large action pictures, most visibly as the antagonist opposite Donnie Yen in Raging Fire, and the recent credits here, Customs Frontline and the 2026 Blades of the Guardians, suggest he has no interest in slowing down.