Gregory Rivers: When I first arrived in Hong Kong, I lived at a friend’s home on Broadcast Drive in Kowloon Tong. TVB at the time was just down the road. When I discovered it, I wrote a letter to them and took it down to the main gate. I never heard from them.
Six months later, I was teaching English at an English conversation school and one of the people working with me there told me about a poster she had seen at her secondary school. TVB was looking for a Caucasian who could speak Cantonese. She gave me the phone number and I called. The person who answered was a freelance agent. I wasn’t confident but the agent couldn’t find anyone else and consequently introduced me to the producer at TVB. The producer pulled out a script for me to read and indicated that I should read a few lines of English dialog for her. After several minutes of being too nervous to speak, I finally spoke the dialog and she reluctantly took me on.
TVB was a lucky break for me. It wasn’t planned. It just happened. So to answer the question, getting into the industry wasn’t hard, but advancing in the industry has proved very difficult.
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