Paing Takhon (Burmese: ပိုင်တံခွန်; pronounced [pàɪɰ̃ dəgʊ̀ɰ̃] ; born 1996) is a Burmese model, actor, and singer.[2][3] He began his entertainment career in 2014 as a runway model.[4][5] He is also one of the few Myanmar citizens with an international profile, given the country only began opening up to the outside world over the last decade.[6]

Paing Takhon
ပိုင်တံခွန်
Paing Takhon in 2019
Born
Sit Ko Paing
စစ်ကိုပိုင်

1996 (age 27–28)[1]
Kawthaung, Myanmar
EducationUniversity of Distance Education, Yangon
Occupations
  • Model
  • actor
  • singer
  • entrepreneur
Years active2014–present

In 2018, Paing Takhon featured on the BuzzFeed's "23 Stunning South Asian Men That Are Too Gorgeous For Words".[7][8] In 2019, he was listed on The Myanmar Times "Top 10 Actors".[9]

Early life and education

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Paing Takhon was born Sit Ko Paing (Burmese: စစ်ကိုပိုင်)[10] in 1996 in Kawthaung, Tanintharyi Region, Myanmar,[1] to Tun Moe and his wife, Khin Kyu. He grew up in Khamaukgyi.[11] He is the fourth child of six siblings, having an elder brother, two elder sisters and two younger brothers.[12] He graduated high school from Basic Education High School No. 1 Khamaukgyi. In 2014, he moved to Yangon to become a model. In 2017, he began studying psychology at the University of Distance Education, Yangon.[13]

Career

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2014–2016: Beginnings as a model

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He joined John Lwin's model training in 2014. Since then, he took professional training in modelling and catwalk. He began his entertainment career as a runway model as part of the John Lwin's Star & Model International Modeling Agency with countless advertising shows and runways that had been walked on. Then came the offers for TV commercials and then DVD ones. He has appeared in many music videos and as fashion model on magazine cover photos. His hardwork as a model and acting in commercials was noticed by the film industry and soon, movie casting offers came rolling in.[14]

In 2016, he attended to Indonesia to take part in "Asean Celebrity Explore Quest Malaysia 2016" (ACEQM) together with Nan Su Yati Soe as a representative from Myanmar which is held with famous celebrities and models from South East Asia countries. They performed together U Shwe Yoe and Daw Moe dance at the event.[15]

2017–present: Acting debut and rising popularity

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Rising to fame in 2017, he became an actor.[16] He made his acting debut with a leading role in the film Midnight Traveller alonsige Nang Khin Zay Yar.[17] He then starred in drama film Bad Boys 2 (Angel of Bad Boys), where he played the main role.[18][19] In 2018, he portrayed the male lead in action horror film Thaman Kyar (Weretiger) alongside Angel Lamung.[20][21]

In March 2019, it was announced that he has been cast as the male lead of the documentary drama series Kha Yee Thwar Kauk Kyaung (Traveller's Notes) alongside Thinzar Wint Kyaw.[22] In April 2019, he was cast in the horror film Thu Bal Thu Lae (Who is he?).[23]

As of 2019, he became popular in Thailand,[24] a rare case of fame in the country for a celebrity from Myanmar.[25] On 3 August 2019, he held a grand fan meeting in Bangkok, Thailand, where a huge crowd of many fans gathered. He appeared in commercial endorsements and soap operas in Thailand.[26][27] He is an ASEAN Economic Community ambassador.[12] On 21 September 2019, he was appointed as Myanmar's tourism ambassador to Thailand by the Myanmar Tourism Marketing Association together with the Myanmar Tourism Federation.[28][29] He was named No. 10 in the "100 Most Handsome Faces of 2020" by TC Candler.[30]

In 2020, he was set to star in the upcoming film The Clock: Red Wall directed by Cambodian director Leak Lyda.[31]

In December 2021, Paing Takhon was ranked #1 in "The 100 Most Handsome Faces of 2021" list issued by TC Candler.[32]

Music career

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Paing Takhon started singing in 2017. He launched his debut solo album Chit Thu (Lover) on 16 September 2017.[33] He donated all his money from selling his albums to orphan children from Ananda Metta orphan school.[34]

Brand ambassadorships

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He is also known as the face of many brands. His first brand worked as the ambassador for Pond's Myanmar in 2014. In 2019, he started working as brand ambassador for major brands such as Oppo Myanmar, Telenor Myanmar, Sunkist Myanmar, T247 energy drink, MG Vehicles Myanmar and Sailun Tire Myanmar.[35][36]

Business

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Paing Takhon is a business partner and share holder of the United Amara Bank. He is also the founder of a beauty product company.[37][38]

Political activities

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Following the 2021 Myanmar coup d'état, Paing Takhon was active in the anti-coup movement both in person at rallies and through social media.[39] Denouncing the military coup, he has taken part in protests since February.[40] He joined the "We Want Justice" three-finger salute movement. The movement was launched on social media, and many celebrities have joined the movement.[41]

On 7 April 2021, warrants for his arrest were issued under section 505 (a) of the Myanmar Penal Code by the State Administration Council for speaking out against the military coup. Along with several other celebrities, he was charged with calling for participation in the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM) and damaging the state's ability to govern, with supporting the Committee Representing Pyidaungsu Hluttaw, and with generally inciting the people to disturb the peace and stability of the nation.[42]

On 8 April 2021, he was arrested and taken into custody in the North Dagon area of Yangon at 5:00 am from his mother's home, according to local media reports. He was suffering from cerebral malaria and congenital diseases including coronary heart disease and asthma at the time when he was arrested.[43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50] He was sentenced to three years of hard labor.[51] He was released from Insein Prison under a state pardon on 2 March 2022 after agreeing to collaborate with the military.[52][53] In April 2023, Takhon performed for the military at Myanmar Thingyan Festival and was subsequently boycotted.[53]

Filmography

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Film

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Year English title Burmese title Role Notes
2017 Midnight Travellers သန်းခေါင်ယံခရီးသည်များ
Bad Boys 2 လူဆိုးလေးများ ၂
2018 Thaman Kyar သမန်းကျား English: "Weretiger"
2023 Kan Kaung ကံကောင်း English: "The Lucky"
TBA Thu Bal Thu Lae သူဘယ်သူလဲ English: "Who Is He?"

Television

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Year English title Burmese title Role Notes
TBA Kha Yee Thwar Kauk Kyaung ခရီးသွားကောက်ကြောင်း English: "Traveller's Notes"

Discography

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Solo albums

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  • Chit Thu (Lover (ချစ်သူ) (2016)

References

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  1. ^ a b "Dissident actor has no expectation of release from Myanmar prison". Thai PBS. 16 November 2021. Archived from the original on 16 November 2021.
  2. ^ Thet, Khin Swe (17 June 2019). "ချစ်တဲ့ပရိသတ်တွေရှိတာနဲ့ ကျေနပ်ပြီဆိုတဲ့ သရုပ်ဆောင် ပိုင်တံခွန်". 7Day News (in Burmese).
  3. ^ Thet, Khin Swe (25 June 2018). "ဇာတ်ကားရိုက်ကူးမှုနည်းတဲ့အကြောင်းပြောတဲ့ ပိုင်တံခွန်". 7Day News (in Burmese).
  4. ^ "မကြာမီမှာ ရုံတင်ပြသတော့မယ့် "Bad Boys 2" ရုပ်ရှင်ကား". The Voice Weekly. 7 May 2018.
  5. ^ "Myanmar actor Paing Takhon shaves head for monk stint, goes viral on Internet". The Straits Times. 15 January 2021.
  6. ^ "ကမ္ဘာ့ အချောဆုံး အမျိုးသား အယောက် ၁၀၀ စာရင်းတွင် ပိုင်တံခွန် ပါဝင်". The Irrawaddy (in Burmese). 24 October 2021.
  7. ^ "အာရှက စွဲမက်ဖွယ်ကောင်းတဲ့ အမျိုးသားစာရင်းမှာ ပါဝင်တဲ့ ပိုင်တံခွန်". The Irrawaddy (in Burmese). 23 April 2018.
  8. ^ "21 Stunning South Asian Men That Are Too Gorgeous For Words". BuzzFeed. 21 April 2018.
  9. ^ "Top 10 : Actors". The Myanmar Times. 9 August 2019.
  10. ^ "နာမည်ကြီး အနုပညာရှင် ၂၀ နီးပါး အဖမ်းခံရ၊ ၁၀၀ ကျော် ထွက်ပြေး တိမ်းရှောင်နေ". Radio Free Asia (in Burmese). 28 May 2021. Archived from the original on 28 May 2021.
  11. ^ Han, Yu Phyu (14 June 2019). ""နယ်က ပရိသတ်တွေ ချစ်လို့ နမ်းကြတာကို ကျေးဇူးတင်တယ်"လို့ ပိုင်တံခွန် ပြော". The Irrawaddy (in Burmese).
  12. ^ a b Thaitrakulpanich, Asaree; Reporter, Staff (8 August 2019). "This Sexy Burmese Model Is Myanmar's Hottest Export Right Now". Khao Sod.
  13. ^ Myo Ko (14 August 2017). "Psychology ပထမနှစ်ပြန်တက်နေတဲ့ ပိုင်တံခွန်". Shwemon (in Burmese). Archived from the original on 22 August 2017.
  14. ^ Poe, Chit (24 June 2019). ""လူငယ်တွေ ငွေကို ချစ်ပါ၊ စုဆောင်းပါ"လို့ ပြောတဲ့ မော်ဒယ် ပိုင်တံခွန်". The Irrawaddy (in Burmese).
  15. ^ Thiha Toe (16 October 2016). "အာဆီယံ ၁၀ နိုင်ငံကို "ဦးရွှေရိုးနဲ့ ဒေါ်မိုးအက" ကပြခဲ့တဲ့ ပိုင်တံခွန်နဲ့ နန်းဆုရတီစိုး" (in Burmese). The Irrawaddy.
  16. ^ Thet, Khin Swe (31 January 2019). "ယောက်ျားလေးပရိသတ်တွေ အားပေးရင် ပိုပျော်တဲ့ ပိုင်တံခွန်". 7Day News (in Burmese).
  17. ^ "ရိုက်ကွင်းမှာ သရဲပူးတာမြင်တွေ့ရတဲ့ သရုပ်ဆောင်ပိုင်တံခွန်". Kumudra (in Burmese). 4 March 2017.
  18. ^ Thu, Zay (27 December 2016). "ရိုက်ကွင်းမှာ သရဲပူးတာမြင်တွေ့ရတဲ့ သရုပ်ဆောင်ပိုင်တံခွန်". 7Day News (in Burmese).
  19. ^ "လူဆိုးလေးများရဲ့ နတ်မိမယ် Angel of bad boys shooting – ဇေရဲထက်၊ ပိုင်တံခွန်၊ ပက်ထရစ်ရှာ". Myanmar Cele Crazy. 5 January 2017 – via YouTube.
  20. ^ Lu, Daung (30 May 2018). "သမန်းကျား ဝိညာဉ်ဗီဒီယိုဇာတ်ကား အွန်လိုင်းတွင် အခမဲ့ဖြန့်ဝေသွားမည်". Mizzima (in Burmese).
  21. ^ Han, Yu Phyu (31 May 2018). ""သမန်းကျား" ဇာတ်ရုပ်မှာ သရုပ်ဆောင်ဖို့ စိုးရိမ်စိတ်ရှိနေတဲ့ ပိုင်တံခွန်". The Irrawaddy (in Burmese).
  22. ^ Poe, Chit (29 March 2019). "သင်ဇာဝင့်ကျော်နဲ့အတူ "ခရီးသွားကောက်ကြောင်း" ရိုက်ကူးနေတဲ့ ပိုင်တံခွန်". The Irrawaddy (in Burmese).
  23. ^ Thet, Khin Swe (30 April 2019). "သင်ဇာဝင့်ကျော်နဲ့ ဆိုက်ကိုဇာတ်ကားရိုက်မယ့် ပိုင်တံခွန်". 7Day News (in Burmese).
  24. ^ "Myanmar actor arrested as junta hunts 120 celebrities". CNA. 8 April 2018.
  25. ^ Thaitrakulpanich, Asaree; Reporter, Staff (8 August 2019). "This Sexy Burmese Model Is Myanmar's Hottest Export Right Now". Khaosod English.
  26. ^ Jirayu, Eddie (31 July 2019). "Myanmar Model That Won Thai Girls' Hearts Will Be Hosting First Meet And Greet in Bangkok". The Smart Local.
  27. ^ "A Handsome Burmese Model Paing Takhon". Thai Update. 7 August 2019.
  28. ^ Zeyar Hein (23 September 2019). "Actor appointed tourism ambassador to Thailand". The Myanmar Times.
  29. ^ "Paing Takhon appointed tourism ambassador". Mizzima. 27 September 2019.
  30. ^ "Oh My Buddha! Actor Paing Thakhon's ripped reverence goes viral all over". Coconuts. 18 January 2021.
  31. ^ "Film starring Paing Takhon, foreign movie stars to start shooting in April". Eleven. 13 January 2020.
  32. ^ "The Most Handsome Face of 2021 Has Been Announced".
  33. ^ Hein, Kyaw Zaw (13 September 2017). "မကြာခင် တွေ့ရမည့် ပိုင်တံခွန်၏ ချစ်သူ". Mizzima (in Burmese).
  34. ^ "သီချင်းခွေ ရောင်းရငွေကို ပရဟိတလုပ်မယ်ဆိုတဲ့ ပိုင်တံခွန်". Kumudra (in Burmese). 18 September 2017.
  35. ^ "လက်ရှိရေပန်းစားဆုံး မင်းသားပိုင်တံခွန်ရဲ့ Exclusive ၅ ခု". Myanmar Live News (in Burmese). 11 July 2019.
  36. ^ "ပိုင်တံခွန်၊ ယွန်းယွန်း တို့ တက်ရောက်ခဲ့တဲ့ "T247" ခွန်အားဖြည့် အချိုရည် မိတ်ဆက်ပွဲ". Myanmar Celebrity News (in Burmese). 25 May 2019.
  37. ^ "မြန်မာမော်ဒယ် ပိုင်တံခွန် ထိုင်းမလေးတွေအကြား ရေပန်းစားနေ (ရုပ်သံ)". DVB (in Burmese). 18 July 2019.
  38. ^ "လက်ရှိရေပန်းစားဆုံး မင်းသားပိုင်တံခွန်ရဲ့ Exclusive ၅ ခု". Myanmar Live News (in Burmese). 11 July 2019.
  39. ^ "Myanmar celebs and artists stand against the military coup". The Myanmar Times. 3 February 2021.
  40. ^ "Here's who is standing up against Myanmar's coup". Coconuts. 3 February 2021.
  41. ^ "Hunger Games salute catching fire in post-coup Myanmar". Coconuts. 3 February 2021.
  42. ^ "Myanmar celebrity model arrested as military targets public figures". The Guardian. 8 April 2021.
  43. ^ "Myanmar: Celebrity model arrested amid coup crackdown". BBC News. 8 April 2021.
  44. ^ "Myanmar Activists Maintain Show Protests, Another Movie Star Detained". The Daily Celebrity News.
  45. ^ "11 Killed As Myanmar Protesters Fight Troops, Another Celebrity Detained". 9 April 2021.
  46. ^ "Actor Paing Takhon detained by The Junta Forces while suffering from serious heart condition". Taipei Times. 9 April 2021.
  47. ^ "Myanmar celebrities arrested for backing anti-coup protests as death toll nears 600". YYC Times.
  48. ^ "Myanmar coup armed clashes split out among troops and anti-junta protesters". Make Digitally.
  49. ^ "An ninh Myanmar bắt nam người mẫu". VN Express (in Vietnamese). 8 April 2021.
  50. ^ "Paing Takhon Update by MGR Online". MGR Online.
  51. ^ "Paing Takhon: Myanmar celebrity gets three years in jail for mass protests". BBC. 28 December 2021.
  52. ^ "Myanmar military pardons actor Paing Takhon for supporting pro-democracy protests". The Independent. 2 March 2022.
  53. ^ a b Venema, Vibeke (7 June 2023). "Lily Naing Kyaw: Killing of Myanmar singer unnerves pro-military celebrities". BBC News. Retrieved 22 July 2023.