Faking it as a Doctor in China

Following in the footsteps of Brad Pitt, Jodie Foster and so many other household names, here's how I got ahead in advertising.

Far from Hollywood on China's southeast coast lies the city of Fuzhou; famous for mass producing tea, being covered in banyan trees and letting me live there for a year back in 2013.

Despite Fuzhou being a city of more than 7 million people, there were very few foreigners (wàiguó rén) living there when I arrived to teach English. Most people moving to China at the time chose international hubs like Shanghai, Beijing and Shenzhen, but I was drawn to Fuzhou: less glamorous, occasionally grim but wonderful and welcoming (additionally, it was the only school I applied to after Googling English in China).

Doug, a jolly Canadian who was also an English teacher at my school, was asked to find two other people to star alongside him as a world renowned team of plastic surgeons. I heeded the call.

As a method actor like Brando and De Niro, I immediately enrolled in the Harvard School of Medicine for seven years and completed a hospital residency to make sure I could get my teeth into this role. As soon as I felt I was ready, I threw down the scalpel mid-surgery and headed straight back to Fuzhou.

Filming began in the main reception area of the private plastic surgery company, where the walls of the building were blinding white like the botched teeth whitenings taking place up the spiral staircase on the second floor.

The director only spoke a few words of English and the three of us could barely cobble a sentence in Chinese, so hand signals (like so often during my time in China) were the main form of communication. It's amazing how much you can get done by waving, just ask the Queen.

The first shot proved a little more difficult than the director may have intended. At first, Doug and I failed to synchronise how we should react to seeing a breast implant in a display case that looked like a scale model of the money chamber at the end of the Crystal Maze. In the end, I went for a nod that communicated my approval of the quality of the breast in the jar.

Happy with this performance, we moved onto the spoken section. Due to budget limitations and as the only native English speakers in the room, the three of us were asked to write the one-on-one interview responses ourselves. As a budding writer, this appealed to me greatly. Here's what I came up with:

"I have always wanted to learn from the very best in my field. I come from a background of learning about medicine from the West," which let's face it - is total bollocks.

Remarkably, despite my acting and script struggles, somebody saw the raw talent in me and I was cast in a historical drama for Chinese public television as a 19th-century English teacher vaguely resembling Abraham Lincoln.

When I finally caught a glimpse of our advertisement on a bus, I realised that we weren't the only foreign faces to feature after all. Due to the lack of copyright laws, some of the world's most famous female supermodels appear at the end cleverly disguised as "Linda," "Masu," and "Yoyana." Unfortunately, they'll be upset to learn that they didn't make the director's cut featuring my brilliant script here:

From small screen to big, check out the account of my time as Liam Neeson's stand-in on a Scorsese film: