SINGAPORE – On screen, an unconfident, people-pleasing and overweight woman takes up boxing and transforms not just her body, but her life along with it.

In real life, Chinese comedienne-actress Jia Ling did pretty much the same.

For the sports drama Yolo, she put on 20kg to up her weight to around 100kg to play protagonist Du Leying at the beginning of the movie, which opens in Singapore cinemas on March 21.

Over a year of filming, she kept up a strict training regimen and stuck to a diet to lose close to 50kg to play someone forever changed by her passion for boxing.  

In a video interview with The Straits Times, 41-year-old Jia – who also directed Yolo – says she felt bad to ask another actress to take on the physically demanding leading role.

The film is an adaptation of the 2014 Japanese movie 100 Yen Love.

“I can be very brutal with myself, but as a director, I’m quite introverted. I don’t like to demand things of other people or trouble other people,” she adds.

Instead, she took on the challenge herself, but not without a lot of trepidation and going through several “stages of fear”. 

“It was a very agonising process that went very slowly,” she says. “But I never considered giving up.”