You may not have realised it — and it was because he disappeared so completely into his roles — but you saw him grow up on screen. He was a talented child actor and appeared in several dramas starting from when he was nine, though he recoiled from the attention. “When I was young, I really hated acting and the attention that came with it. I always thought that if I weren't an actor, maybe people wouldn't give me weird looks,” he had told us in an interview. But you can never bottle talent.

In 2003, he gave a heartbreaking performance as a deathly-ill kid in A Child’s Hope. He may have been just 12 then but it was clear that he would grow up to be an exciting young actor. And we weren’t the only ones who thought so — he impressed so much he was nominated for the Young Talent Award at the Star Awards in 2003.

We didn’t think we would be writing a tribute about his tragically abbreviated life just a decade and a half later.  

The first time we met Aloy was in 2013 when we shot him for an 8 DAYS magazine cover together with Ian Fang, Xu Bin, Joshua Tan and Tosh Zhang. He was much taller than we had expected. He was also quiet, nervous and had kept to himself the whole time. It didn’t help that our stylist had put him in a floral shirt that not only accentuated his skinny frame, it was also, put simply, wrong for him. And we had a feeling that he had felt uncomfortable in the outfit too, though he didn’t show it. In fact, when he changed out of the shirt at the end of the shoot, he folded it neatly before returning it to our stylist. It was an unexpected gesture of good upbringing that not everyone present had displayed. He then went on to thank us for putting him on the cover before saying goodbye. Aloysius was consistently polite to a fault.

Till this day, we still wish that Aloy had been given a nicer outfit. He deserved better.

We would photograph Aloy again for our cover a year later. He had just been anointed one of the Eight Dukes of Mediacorp and along with the other seven guys, was on the fast track to the big time. While a year earlier he had been jittery and awkward when it came to posing for the camera, he was now a lot more polished and confident.

He was still as reticent as the sun (“I can be so quiet that people won't notice me, he joked then. He was wrong.) But something was different. He exuded cool and a matured groundedness that was atypical for someone who was just 24 then. There was also a gentle soulfulness about him, which would go on to become his defining quality.

2014 was also the year that he made us sit up and pay attention to his acting. He was the heart and soul of Ch 8’s I’m In Charge where he played a rebellious teen wise beyond his years who had to take on the responsibility of supporting his family. He had said before in interviews that he too was a delinquent in his youth and that it was acting that reined him in. And he conveyed it all on screen, where he had the ability to be breezy and serious at once — a talent that many actors older than him can only dream of possessing. 

He would score a Best Supporting Actor nom at the Star Awards in 2015 for playing an unnervingly-frightful sociopath in Against The Tide. Though he didn’t win, he did pick up the award for Best Newcomer. And it was clear that while he looked like a K-pop idol, he was a thespian at heart. “[Acting] that’s what I want to be recognised for. I don’t care about my looks or how many Instagram followers I have. I just want to perfect my craft,” he told us then.

But as much as Aloy loved acting, he was under no illusions about its shortcomings. In 2017, he announced he was quitting acting full-time and that he had started a wood plastic composite business with his brother. “I don’t want my income to be so dependent on one job. I want to be able to be in control… If, for some reason, I cannot continue acting, at least, I've got something else to fall back on which can support me financially,” he told us then. But acting was still his passion. “If there are acting jobs, I’ll drop everything to focus on my acting,” he said in the same interview. He also told us that he had dreams of being a director.

And in the year after that, the SIM graduate would show his impressive range in some of his most memorable and quirky roles. He revealed his gift for comedy playing a love-struck alien in My Friends From Afar and the scene where he gives birth (it’s sci-fi, after all) was everything you could ask for from a scene about a guy giving birth. Then there was his role in 29^th February where he was a glib insurance sales man who learns to cherish his loved ones after getting trapped in a time loop. He was likeable and relatable and fuelled the peculiar drama with valuable moments of warmth.

Most recently, he filmed the Toggle romance-mystery Beijing to Moscow where he traipsed across China and Russia for two months with Felicia Chin. By the end of the shoot last October, he said that he finally understood the “definition of being homesick”. The show is slated to premiere in June.

Before his untimely death, Aloy was set to take on his first lead role in the upcoming Ch 8 drama My One in a Million. He was reportedly really looking forward to the role and that he had even asked about work when he regained consciousness on his hospital bed in New Zealand. He would have showed us more of what he could do. If only he got the chance.

We’ll never get to see what Aloysius was truly capable of as an actor. But why dwell on that? Let’s just remember him as one of the most soulful actors to ever grace our screens. He would have liked that.