Who she is: Ms Deborah Png is a California-licensed attorney and studio business affairs executive. She has worked on television shows including The Calling (2022), Young Rock (2021-2023) and American Auto (2021-2023). Her most recent projects include We Were Liars and the upcoming Ponies, starring Emilia Clarke and Haley Lu Richardson.
If you caught the psychological thriller series We Were Liars (based on E. Lockhart’s bestseller) on Prime Video, released in June this year, you might be interested to know that Singaporean lawyer and thespian Ms Deborah Png (Law ’88) worked on its development and production deals. For over a decade, Ms Png has served as a business affairs attorney for companies such as Sony Pictures and NBC Universal, making deals, acquiring intellectual property and handling licensing with platforms including Netflix, Apple and Prime Video.
How Ms Png became an entertainment lawyer in Hollywood has its roots in a tragic loss. In 2010, her husband, Curt Ewald, passed away within six weeks of being diagnosed with non-smoker’s lung cancer. At the time, their daughter was just 11 and their son 9. Ms Png immediately went into problem-solving mode. “I had to buy a house because we were renting at the time. And starting that year, my daughter was going to a different school, so I was working out different pickup times.”
As a single mother with two school-aged children, Ms Png decided to return to the legal profession. Before moving to the US, she had worked as a lawyer, including with Singapore firm Tan Rajah & Cheah. To work as a lawyer in the US, she would need to pass the Professional Responsibility exam before being allowed to sit for the bar. “I told myself I was just going to study on my own — and if I passed, then I would take the bar exam.” She passed, signed up for a Bar Review course covering 17 subjects, and then took the bar exam in February 2012. “I was scared about the exam as it had been a long while since law school,” she revealed. “Then while I was taking it, I found myself thinking, ‘This is so much easier than law school exams in NUS!’”
Now qualified to practise, Ms Png decided to pursue a career in entertainment business law. It was not easy, as the US adopts an apprenticeship system. “You have to start from the bottom — it doesn’t matter what you’ve done before,” she explained. She started out freelancing, drafting contracts for independent production and distribution companies, including one led by a Bollywood CEO and another focused on movie packaging. “That one was a good experience. You do deals with actors and distributors, producers, directors and writers, and then you go to a distributor and pre-sell it, and then the financing company will finance it,” she elaborated.
Through a string of experiences and recommendations, Ms Png found herself offered the position of business affairs attorney for the international television production division of Sony Pictures Entertainment. “That was my first executive position as business affairs attorney,” she said.
LEARNING BY DOING
Ms Png graduated from NUS Law in 1988. “The first thing I remember about law school was one of the first lectures about law and freedom,” she recalled. “The point was made that there’s no such thing as absolute freedom for everybody. The limit of your freedom is how far your arm can reach before you hit someone.”
She also remembers Professor Walter Woon (Law ’81)—who would later become Attorney-General of Singapore—as a lecturer who was feared by all. “He was very exacting and demanding, but we were all like, ‘There’s so much reading to do! We can’t catch up!’ And he said, ‘Okay, I’ll be available at this time, and everybody can come and ask questions.’ His nice, kind-hearted nature came to the fore.”
Ms Png specialised in litigation. One of her favourite classes was with now-Justice Choo Han Teck (Law ’79). “It was practical — everything else was just reading. It was stressful: the midterm exam was a trial, and then the final exam was a major trial. But you’re actually getting up on your feet and doing it.” She practised litigation for three years at Tan Rajah & Cheah, “seeing people at their worst” as they battled it out in court. She then decided to take up a job as in-house legal counsel for Shell.
Ms Png’s theatre career blossomed concurrently with her legal career. Before being called to the bar, she was part of the original cast of the musical Beauty World. She also toured as a vocalist with Dick Lee on his Mad Chinaman tour. Of all the many roles she has played, her favourite remains Gigi in Action Theatre’s Ka-Ra-U-OK (1998). “It was a funny, comedic, heart-rending role,” she recalls of the diva with a tragic backstory. That she is today in both entertainment and law seems natural for someone who has straddled both industries since her 20s. “I feel as if I need both acting and law,” she said. “To survive, I had to have both.”
CREATING SINGAPORE STORIES FOR A GLOBAL AUDIENCE
Ms Png struck out on her own this year with Causal Media Resources, a production label that is dedicated to bringing Southeast Asian stories and talents to a global audience. Trying to be an actress in the US when she moved there in the early 2000s was difficult. There was virtually no differentiation between Asian cultures, and there was — and still is — little content specific to Southeast Asia that speaks to a global viewership.
“When I came to the US, I was like ‘Oh, I’m so irrelevant to the American musical, in particular. They’re never going to cast an Asian in a role that’s not Asian,” she said. “Now there’s Crazy Rich Asians, but those roles are still few and far between,” Ms Png noted. “Nobody can tell our story the way we can. I want to do more multicultural productions; if we don’t create or develop or produce those stories, no one else is going to do it for us.
“Our stories would not be like Squid Game or Parasite – those are very Korean; ours would be more multicultural, given our history and where we’re situated. Our audience is not just Singaporean: it’s an American story, a British story and a Southeast Asian story as well.”
Ms Png is collaborating with Singapore-born Hollywood actress Lydia Look, Ekachai Uekrongtham as well as theatre veterans she has been working with since her early days. She is currently in the process of pitching projects for development and production and is confident the time is now: “We have to be writing, creating, developing and producing our own stories in the context of our world, for an international audience.”
