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Anson Lo is one of Hong Kong’s most recognizable entertainment figures, but he still describes himself as feeling small.

The singer and actor – best known as a member of boy group Mirror and as a solo force with four consecutive Chill Club Male Singer of the Year gold awards to his name – spoke to Variety on the sidelines of Hong Kong FilMart, and the portrait that emerges is of a performer defined less by his accolades than by the pressure he places on himself.

“It’s wonderful to be me, but also a little bit challenging as well,” he says, “because I think people expect a lot from me.” That expectation is something he has learned to channel rather than resist. “I tend to put a lot of pressure onto myself. It makes me push more boundaries and feel braver to try more new things as well.”

That pressure extends to his acting work. Lo recently appeared as himself in “The Season,” the upcoming PCCW Media and SK Global six-part series set for a global premiere in June 2026. The English-language drama – which stars Jessie Mei Li, Chris Pang, Karena Lam, Justin Chien, Yvonne Chapman, Celina Jade, Toby Stephens and Lee Jae-yoon – was one of the marquee titles at this year’s FilMart. Lo describes the experience of working alongside such a seasoned ensemble as a lot of fun, but also nerve-racking. “I had never met the cast members prior to the shooting. Everyone was very experienced, so it made me feel even smaller as an actor and also as a singer,” he says. “But everyone was very nice to me, and everything went well.”

That self-critical instinct has been a constant across his career. Since making his solo debut in 2020, Lo has accumulated chart-topping songs, a 2021 Best New Asian Artist Award (Mandarin) at the Mnet Asia Music Awards, and sold-out concert runs – most notably four nights in 2023 that drew close to 40,000 attendees. But he is quick to redirect attention away from the numbers. “I don’t think about breaking records all the time,” he says. “I tend to focus on my flaws all the time, and I tend to just become a better artist in a very disciplined way.”

Lo credits his years inside Mirror as foundational to who he is on stage. “Being part of Mirror has definitely helped me as a performer, because it allows me to have more experience on stage, and I have got to observe my members’ strengths and weaknesses,” he says. “It has shaped me into a better and more experienced performer.”

The distinction between his work in the group and his solo output is one he takes seriously. As a singer, he says, “I would just be myself, sing however I want, dance however I want – it’s about being my true self.” Acting, by contrast, demands the opposite. “I would just let go of my own identity and fully commit to the role I’m in,” he explains. “It’s about fully becoming another person when I act. So it’s very different.”

When asked what kinds of acting parts he hopes to pursue, Lo’s answer is pointed. “Roles with traumas and mental illness would be very challenging and interesting for me,” he says, “because I tend to study a lot of the mental illnesses. I feel very interested in those kinds of things, and I think it’s important to raise awareness to mental development, and also the mental illness that we’re in.” He situates the impulse in something local and immediate: “As a Hong Kong person myself, Hong Kong people feel very stressed every single day.”

His screen credits already span a breadth of tones and genres – from the romantic comedy “Business Proposal” (2023) to the horror feature “It Remains” (2023) and the heist film “We 12” (2024) – and the desire to push further into psychologically demanding territory suggests a deliberate career trajectory rather than opportunistic casting.

Lo is thoughtful when asked about the broader revival of interest in Hong Kong pop culture. Rather than pointing to any single catalyst, he attributes it to diversification within the industry. “More and more options have been played out,” he says. “Much more different variations of different genres of singers have debuted throughout these years, and I think it is easier for Hong Kong people to have their pick.” He acknowledges the competitive landscape directly – noting that Hong Kong audiences have long gravitated toward K-pop and American pop – and frames the local scene’s growth as a question of offering comparable variety. “With the various choices of Hong Kong pop culture now, I think it’s easier for us to pick our favorites in Hong Kong as well.”

Lo’s regional footprint has expanded steadily, with appearances at the One Love Asia Festival in Malaysia in 2023, the SBS Supersound Festival in 2024 and Waterbomb Singapore in 2025. But performing outside Hong Kong still produces the same nerves that have accompanied him throughout his career. “I’ve always felt very small as a singer, because I don’t think I’m super great at performing compared to all the singers around the world,” he says. “I usually feel very nervous going to different countries or different places.”

What he takes from those experiences, however, is concrete. Observing other artists’ preparations – their professionalism, their focus, their offstage discipline – has pushed him to expand his own creative choices. “The way they do music and do performances has made me just go wild for my music choices as well,” he says.

Locally a superstar, Lo is clear-eyed about where Hong Kong sits in his sense of self as his ambitions grow. “Hong Kong will always be my hometown and will always be something that I cherish the most, because I grew up here,” he says. But he is equally clear that the boundaries are meant to be pushed. “I would love to explore more different stages around the world with my fans. I think me and my fans are more than ready to be brave and go to more different countries to learn more from the others.”

The through-line across all of it – the music, the acting, the international stages – is a pair of principles Lo articulates with plainness. “There are two things that I will not let go,” he says. “One is to be humble, and two is to be ambitious.”

The “Marty Supreme” question that got old in about five minutes — was the title character likable enough? —shouldn’t even be allowed in the same room with Rose Byrne. From the annoyingly upscale “perfect” boss’s wife in “Bridesmaids” to the miserable mother who becomes cosmically unglued in “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” she has made a career of playing characters who are haughty and testy, glamorously difficult and hard to cozy up to. But that’s part of her pizazz as an actor. Who would want Rose Byrne to give you the warm fuzzies? (Though I’m betting that if you cast her in a Colleen Hoover soaper, she’d nail it.) “Tow” is a minor indie that doesn’t always make the right moves, but Byrne seizes her character and turns the question of whether you like her or not into the film’s dramatic motor.

At first, we don’t like her at all. After a while, we still don’t (much), but we find ourselves connecting to something in her that transcends likability — her humanity. That’s acting alchemy.

“Tow” is an elongated anecdote based on a true story, and when you see the film you may think: Why couldn’t they have just made this up? Byrne plays Amanda Ogle (pronounced Oh-gle), who is living out of her car in Seattle. It’s a beat-up 1991 slate-blue Toyota Camry, but the vehicle isn’t just her home; it’s her only friend. She talks on the phone to her teenage daughter in Utah (played by Elsie Fisher, who was so terrific in “Eighth Grade”), but that’s her one connection, and it’s hanging by a thread. We never hear the full story of how she got to where she is.

But Amanda’s presence tells us all we need to know. The blonde hair with bangs, put up in a paisley pink kerchief with a plastic flower tucked in, the leather jacket and big dark-pink sunglasses, the snarling scowl of defiance that’s almost part of the look — it’s all a bit thrift-shop punk, and so is her attitude. (She has the aura of someone who was a punk and is still trying to figure out how to age into adulthood.) Amanda snaps at everyone, but Byrne has such a quick mind that we’re alive to her insults and doomsday quips. Her invective perks us right up.

The movie is this simple: Amanda’s car gets stolen, then recovered the next day, but it’s being kept at a commercial lot — Kaplan Towing — that’s charging her $273 before she can drive it away. To Amanda, that might as well be $273,000. She’s a vet tech who has finally landed employment at a veterinarian’s office, where she’s supposed to do pick-ups. But she can’t do the job without the car, and she can’t pick up the car without the job. The movie is about how she spends an entire year living as a homeless person trying to get her cruddy Toyota back.

She crashes at a church homeless shelter, with adjacent 12-step meetings, the whole place overseen by Barbara, played by Octavia Spencer with a pitch-perfect compassionate ruthlessness. Amanda then takes her case against Kaplan Towing to court, serving as her own lawyer, and she wins the case! — but when she arrives back at the lot in triumph, it’s only to find that they’ve already sold the car at auction. She meets a nonprofit lawyer, Kevin (Dominic Sessa), who’s a saintly geek, and they spend months working on the case. She gets roughed up by the homeless shelter’s resident sociopath (Lea Delaria, who is riveting) and meets comrades like the sweet Nova (Demi Lovato) and the combative Denise (Ariana DeBose), who’s as difficult as Amanda is.

We learn that Amanda is a recovering alcoholic (seven months sober) who had her first drink at 11 (in reaction, the film implies, to her being abused by her father when she was 10). But instead of filling in her slow slide into parking-lot vagrancy, what the film leaves unspoken is that whatever problems she had were pushed over the edge by an impossible economy — which combined, in some way, with her impossible personality. The (minor) strength of “Tow” is that it makes no apologies for Amanda, never pretending that she’s a functional person. Yet it shows us her flawed heart. If the film has a message, it’s that assholes who have lost everything are people too. Especially when they fight the system.

I just wish that the storyline built to something. I like anecdotal movies, but the fact that Amanda spends a year working to get her car back and, from what we can tell, doing little else starts to make this ragtag “Candide” of city bureaucracy feels like it’s running in place. Amanda’s car is more than her car; it’s her dignity. But the film never takes the leap into seeing that thinking that way might be part of the problem.