Have you ever met someone in real life who was nothing like what you thought they would be? For me, that person is Nigel Ng. But to be fair to Ng, that’s also because he is better known as his alter-ego Uncle Roger – an archetypal Malaysian Chinese uncle with a penchant for raw, unflinching honesty. Uncle Roger’s trademark ‘Haiya’, his predilection for grammatically inaccurate words and sentences, his casual slouch and the way he nonchalantly takes down culinary icons like Gordon Ramsay and Jamie Oliver (a favourite target of his) are nowhere to be seen in Ng – who is quite possibly the stark opposite of the character he plays.
In person, the 33-year-old Ng is pleasant and perhaps even a little subdued – at least in comparison to Uncle Roger. For our interview, he wears a grey shirt and formal black pants, a direct contrast from the fiesty orange shirts and shorts that have become Uncle Roger’s uniform. story on YouTube phenomenon Nigel Ng.
(September 11 2024) — ART CHEN/The Star (JUNE 26 2024) — ART CHEN/The Star # Metro Backpages Ng speaks with an indeterminate accent – some Americana, perhaps a slight British inflection but by and large, he sounds like an articulate, middle-class Malaysian. Uncle Roger, he says, is a composite of all the Asian uncles he grew up with. Ng himself may not sound or behave like any of these uncles but he knows them all too well.
“The character is based off of those uncles who would sit at the kopitiam and talk a lot of c.
