It would be easy to open with the obvious: that “Apo” Nattawin Wattanagitiphat is GRAZIA Singapore’s first male cover star, and that this is for him another marker in a career defined by firsts. But spend even a little time with the charismatic Thai actor, and it becomes clear that milestones are not how he thinks.
“I choose to live each day in the present,” he says. “Today, [my fans] love me. Tomorrow? I don’t know.” Apo says this without anxiety or insecurity. Rather, a quiet gratitude laces his words—a nuance that suggests an acute awareness of how quickly things can change in this fast‑paced industry.
That mindset—grounded, curious, introspective—emerges even more clearly when he speaks about acting. “Being an actor allows me to do many different things,” he says. “When you take on a role, you have to study everything about the character: how they think, what they’ve been through, what they’ve done. But most importantly, when we understand ourselves, we can understand the character. I really want to understand myself deeply. And that’s why I became an actor.”
It is a loop Apo returns to again and again throughout this interview: the idea that acting is not really about becoming someone else, but about using other people as mirrors. Every character he has played—warrior, detective, singer, emotionally repressed man—has sent him back to the same question: how much do I understand myself, now that I’ve understood this person?
The answer, for a long time, was: not as much as he thought. After moving into television in 2014 and debuting in the 2015 hit Thai drama Sud Kaen Saen Rak, the former commercial model saw his popularity grow quickly, buoyed by his subsequent involvement in several long‑running TV series. “I got a glimpse of what it felt like to be noticed, to be liked,” he recalls of that early period. “But I don’t think I knew how to handle it. I was focused on the work, not on how to exist in a space where you’re expected to maintain a certain image, where your actions can influence others.”
When his contract with Thai TV network Channel 3 ended in 2019, he decided to take a hiatus. That year, Apo moved to New York and spent about six months there—a period he describes as formative, shaping, as he puts it, “the Apo that everyone sees now”.
The most important lesson he learnt from that experience was independence, he shares. Having started working in the entertainment industry in his late teens, his adult life up till then was structured around having things managed for him.
“As an actor, whether it was scheduling, taking care of daily necessities or managing work, there was always someone handling those things,” he says. “So at the beginning [of my break], I was still attached to that way of living. My way of thinking hadn’t really been exposed much to the realities of everyday life.”
And then, suddenly, it was just him. “I had to remind myself that I wasn’t an actor,” he says, “that I wasn’t someone who had everything taken care of. It felt like starting life over from the beginning. I had to sit down and really think: What are my life goals? How do I find a job to pay rent every month? How do I find a place to live? How do I sign contracts? Who do I need to talk to; how do I get around?”
He laughs, not at the difficulty of it all, but at how clarifying the experience turned out to be. “I realised that I was nobody. I had to forget who I was before. In truth, I had no defined identity. I was just a person adapting to different moments, situations and phases of life.”
Paradoxically, that period of being nobody is what made him somebody. In retrospect, it was one of the most formative resets that could have happened to him, he shares. When the popularity of the 2022 Thai drama KinnPorsche: The Series (his first project after returning from his two‑year hiatus) hit, he was more prepared to handle the fame—the international recognition, fashion show invites and brand ambassadorships that it brought.
“Now, when people say, ‘Hey, you’re famous, people recognise you’, I understand it differently,” he says. “I’ve learnt that there are ups and downs [in this industry]. Staying in the present helps me deal with everything with a deeper understanding.”
But if Apo has finally found his own voice, his latest project ironically sees him inhabit a man who has lost his. With the horror film The Stain, Apo moves into unfamiliar territory—not just in genre, but also in method.
In it, he plays a man worn down by a family that never valued him, shaped by constant instruction and quiet neglect—a portrait of someone eroded by expectation and emotional repression, who has learnt to believe that any action could be the wrong one. “Playing someone who doesn’t express things—that was very difficult,” he admits, laughing at the understatement and adding that it was “very, very uncomfortable”.
The challenge, he explains, was in the texture of unexpressed feelings: trying to repress emotions in both actions and speech, yet revealing just enough for the audience to understand. Beyond that were the demands of the genre itself: he had to find a specific frequency for horror.
“Emotions like happiness, sadness, anger and fear already exist in all of us—but fear is different. It depends on what you’re afraid of and how you experience it. If I saw a ghost, would I be terrified, or would I feel sympathy?”
It is the kind of precision that defines Apo’s approach to acting. For him, every role is, at its core, an exercise in self‑knowledge. “I think that’s the real challenge. You have to find the reasons [for a character’s behaviour] in a very delicate way,” he expounds. “And that always makes me wonder: can I really do it?” That uncertainty is what draws him in; not the confidence of knowing, but the process of finding out. It is this same curiosity that is pushing him towards new frontiers.
At 32, Apo is preparing to step behind the camera for the first time. After years of working across cities and disciplines, he feels ready. While he remains tight‑lipped about his directorial debut, he frames the shift as one of identity—from messenger to communicator. The distinction matters: where acting asks him to translate a character, directing requires him to hold the entire story at once.
The films he wants to make are, characteristically, personal: romantic love stories, primarily. But he is also drawn to horror, precisely for its unfamiliarity. “It’d be very challenging,” he says. “I want to know what it’d be like, since I don’t really watch those kinds of films.”
And what does he want audiences to feel, walking out of a film he directed? He answers without hesitating: “I want people to feel happy. I want them to love themselves, to feel proud of who they are. I want them to go back home and share that happiness with their family—to talk to their parents, their partner, their siblings, or anyone they love.” He thinks about it a beat longer. “And through that happiness, come to understand themselves better. Understand life more.”
That instinct for self‑knowledge extends, unexpectedly, to the objects Apo chooses to keep close. Among them are watches, which he started collecting properly only in recent years, as his career stabilised and he found himself with both the means and the desire to do so. In his telling, his timepieces seem to choose their owner as much as the other way around. These include the first one he fell for—a white gold Piaget with, as he puts it, an “incredibly sexy” black opal dial and an engraved strap—and a Piaget Andy Warhol rose gold watch with a malachite dial that was a New Year’s gift from the maison.
But perhaps what best exemplifies the idea is a vintage Piaget bracelet watch with a tiger’s eye dial that was gifted to him by a fan. It was originally too small to wear, but he loved it so much that instead of setting it aside, he sent it to the Piaget atelier for a year‑long restoration. Artisans sourced matching stones, reworked the engraving and rebuilt the clasp. “When I finally got it back, I felt so proud,” he shares, beaming.
The whole encounter reads like a philosophy in miniature: that the things worth having are those you invest in fully; that authenticity requires patience; and that beauty lies in details no one else might notice. It is a philosophy Apo sees reflected in Piaget itself. “I see myself as someone who has my own perspective and I feel like Piaget is similar,” he says of the maison for which he is a global ambassador. “It’s very detail‑oriented and very committed [to its values]. If it were a person, it’d be firm and dedicated. I think we’re alike in that way.”
Our conversation turns back to other firsts he has experienced recently. He is quick to highlight travel—specifically, to China. “My family is Chinese—my grandparents, my parents, they’ve all been to many cities in China, and they speak Chinese,” he shares, adding that he had never been to the country until recent work trips brought him to Chongqing and Shanghai. “I grew up hearing all those stories from my family. And now, I get to experience the beauty of these places myself.”
What strikes him is that regardless of where he is physically, there is a sameness underneath the difference. People are extraordinarily diverse, city to city, culture to culture; their traditions and languages uniquely their own.
And yet, “one thing that’s the same in every city is that people want love and happiness,” he says. “Something as simple as just smiling at someone—they smile back.” He pauses. “We’ve never met before, but when we do meet, it feels like we already know each other. I think that’s really beautiful.”
That sense of shared humanity has reframed how Apo thinks about success too. The easy definition—fame, money, recognition—no longer satisfies him. “For me, success is about how much I’ve done, what I’ve done, and what I’ve already given or created,” he says. “It’s also about who is still with me along the way.” And that, he makes clear, begins with family—the people who were there before any of this, and who will be there regardless.
After everything—the rise, the retreat, the rebuilding—what stays with you is not the scale of Apo Nattawin’s career, but the way he speaks about it: lightly, thoughtfully, without illusion. He has built a career stepping into other people’s stories, only to return, again and again, to his own. The real work was always closer, quieter, more exacting: to understand himself, as he is, in each passing moment—and to accept that this understanding will never quite be finished.
Photography Waroon Kieattisin
Creative Direction & Styling Kelly Hsu
Hair Roangritz Apisitvachiramatee
Makeup Pakanat Poolsawat
Producer Poonsiri Sanubol
Photography assistants Prompong Dechpol, Ratchapoom Yaemnet, Pongtorn Bua‑im
Fashion assistant Arrisa Arsanork