WEARING just nipple stickers and a G-string, Caroline Cheong had little protection from the chill of early spring in Auckland, New Zealand, last year.

Her 'ordeal' was to get worse as 'buckets of black paint and fake blood' were thrown on her near-naked body.

'I was so cold I turned blue in the face,' the Singaporean actress, 24, told The New Paper in a phone interview from Hong Kong.

The 12 deg C weather was just one of the things she had to endure during the two-month shoot of the supernatural horror flick TheTattooist, which opens next Thursday.

It's her first feature film, and one where, as she puts it herself, she is 'not very properly dressed' in half her scenes.

Caroline's daring performance is a surprise, considering how she's best known for her sweetie-pie characters on TV - most famously, sweet, innocent Kimberly in teen drama Light Years.

The actress, who's based in Singapore, first found out about the role from Fly Entertainment, her management company.

The Tattooist, rated NC16, is a Singapore-New Zealand collaboration. It is co-produced by Eyeworks Touchdown and MediaCorp Raintree Pictures.

It's about a tattoo artist who steals a Samoan tattooing tool. But he ends up being haunted by a vengeful spirit, who kills everyone he tattoos.

'Sweet and innocent' are probably the last words one would use to describe her character,Victoria.

While Caroline doesn't get a lot of screen time, her role is still significant, in that she gets the most gruesome treatment by the ghost that's running amok.

Vic, as the other characters call her in the movie, is feisty, rebellious and sexy.

Caroline would prefer to replace the last word with 'spunky'. Sexy wasn't something she was 'playing up' in Vic, she said.

It's hard not to think 'sexy' though, what with the come-hither looks she shoots at Jason Behr (TheGrudge), who plays the tattooist Jake who gives her a deadly tattoo.

Or the fact that she has two shower scenes.

An even sexier part was cut - a post-shower scene where she puts on her clothes.

She admitted she wasn't comfortable doing it because, 'like every girl on the street, I have some qualms about my own body'.

It helped that Behr was helpful and professional.

'He behaved the same way when I had clothes on and when I didn't have a lot of clothes on,' she said.

Then there's what she calls 'the hospital scene'.

In it, she's hardly clothed and slathered in buckets of ink and fake blood while being attacked by the ghost, played by a dancer named Ian Vincent.

AWKWARD

'It was extremely awkward,' she said.

They hadn't met before and before she knew it, this stranger, who was covered in black paint and, like her, wearing only underwear, was sitting on her.

She remembered the very quick introduction they received.

She recalled: 'Hi, Victoria, he's Ian, he'll be on top of you. Ian, she's Victoria, you'll be on top of her.'

Then, there's the make up.

Putting on and removing her fake tattoos took an hour each time.

For a week, she also had to put on body paint that took three to four hours.

Caroline even needed her make up artist - a woman, she quickly clarified - in the shower to help her scrub it off.

She said she didn't have a special fitness regime to prepare for the role.

'I'm sort of a sporty person, I do swim a lot. I do yoga,' she said.

But she did watch her diet. (She made up for it with an eating spree once she got back to Singapore.)

Why did she decide to take the role?

'I thought this was a good chance to try something new. And filming in New Zealand - how do you turn that down?' she said.

So she auditioned along with many other actresses, some of whom were well-known, and clinched the role.

In New Zealand, she sat down with director Peter Burger to look at concept art and discuss her limits when it came to nudity.

'We compromised a bit,' she said.

Her parents were also excited, mainly because of the New Zealand shoot.

'About the clothes thing, they don't quite have to know, right?' she said, laughing.

She plans to watch the film with them when she returns to Singapore next month. She is in Hong Kong to attend a workshop.

She wouldn't elaborate on the workshop, except to say it's for 'self-improvement'. It was 'an excuse to get away and do something different for a while'.

Other than Light Years, she also appeared on Phua Chu Kang and Growing Up as well as Channel 8 dramas like Always On My Mind and The Champions.

She hosted a children's TV programme, starred in two short films and has also done theatre, such as the Chinese play Ten Brothers, for Toy Factory.

She doesn't have any acting jobs lined up at the moment and now does mostly live hosting at events and lunches.

She's not worried, though. If Vic opens up new acting opportunities, great. If not, she's happy with what she's doing, she said.