Agnes Monica’s Coming of Age

A TV regular since grade school, Agnes Monica navigated the awkward teenage years to become entertainment’s hottest property. Now she is following her dream for the big time, and she believes. Bruce Emond reports.

It’s a muggy late summer day in New York City, and Simon Cowell is doing that little oral fixation thing with his pen, twisting and twirling it inside his notorious orifice of venom.

As Agnes Monica’s final wah-wah-wah-yeah-yeah-yeah fades out from an English-language rendition of her hit Bilang Saja Bila Kau Mau (Just Tell Me If You Want It), Cowell looks up and fixes her with his gaze. It’s clearly not one of his rare soft and soppy looks that he reserves for the chunky belter wearing her heart on her sleeve, or the quirky mop-headed cut-up who tweaks his funny bone.  

“No, sunshine, I don’t want it. You are pretty, you can sing and dance a bit, and you may be good for Indochina or wherever you come from, but it just won’t cut it here. Now pack your bags and skedaddle on home.”

Of course, the above is merely a fancifully imagined, purely fictitious what-if encounter. If their paths do cross one day, whose to know if the hard-to-please Englishman would take a shine to Indonesia’s 20-year-old singing-dancing-acting phenom.

And even if he did not, it’s very doubtful that Agnes would nurse a crushed ego, shave her head in a Britney-esque meltdown and head straight to LaGuardia for the long flight home.

For she has that type of unshakeable, solid, almost prepotent belief in oneself that allows the possessor to take in stride whatever life throws at her. Of course, that brimming confidence, her dabbling in the latest trends from abroad and her success sets her up to be slapped down. She has dealt with the snipes of tabloid scribes about reported arrogance and an “attitude problem” (with them at least), and the put-downs about her singing and fashion sense (she is a prize target of the scathing fashion police at the website http://whodoyouthinkheare.blogspot.com) .

She will need that inner resolve and then some if she carries through this year with a long-held plan to embark on an international career by first testing the waters in the Big Apple.

“I have gone back and forth about it, about whether this is the right thing to do or not, but I think the time is right,” said Agnes, who plans to make the big move in June, for about two months at first.

Her mother, who has always been there from the very beginning of her career, will go to New York with her, but she was not immediately sold on the idea.

“We assume that people live freer lives there, but I told her, ‘If I wanted to do things like drugs and stuff, then I can do it right here, I don’t have to go abroad’.”

There are several big factors working in her favor: She is bright, ranking top of the class during most of her schooling and studying law at university. She speaks varying levels of English, Japanese and Mandarin and admits that she loves the process of knowledge gathering.

She is pretty in that pale, finely chiseled, delicate look of the heroines of popular Japanese comics and fashion magazines.

Apart from the looks and the brains, Agnes also has a big management team, headed by her older brother Steven, to carefully look out for her interests.   

And she has strong faith, not only in herself, but from religion. As we talked during a break in shooting of her latest soap, a leather-bound Bible and several Christian motivational books were at her side among a stash of fashion magazines.

During the Indonesian Music Awards (AMI) last December, Agnes, dressed in an unusual frock that appeared to some to be channeling Marie Antoinette after a bad night at the Bastille, thanked Jesus Christ in her acceptance speech for best female pop performer, prompting an apparently mocking “hallelujah” from presenter Ahmad Dhani.

“Thank you, Dhani,” she icily responded.

She had cleaned up at 2006’s round of year-end awards shows, including being named MTV’s best female singer, to cement her place in the local entertainment industry. 

“Awards have never been my main goal, that if I don’t get an award I will be sad and depressed. Awards are just a result of hard work. What is more important to me is my hard work, and doing it the right way instead of the wrong way.”

Still, all those trophies on the mantelpiece won’t make the leap to the international stage any easier: Only fellow Indonesian Anggun has succeeded before her, and she is still a bigger name in Europe than she is in the United States. Even Asian-American entertainers are few and far between in the U.S.

“I guess they will look at me as coming from Indonesia, thinking that it’s a third world country and wondering what I have to offer …Anggun did it, but she was at a different stage in her career, when she was younger and perhaps not as involved in as many things as I am.”

It’s a risk, but like everything in her career, it seems a calculated one; nothing fell into her lap. And she loves a challenge.

She started out as a toddler precociously aping TV announcers. Her parents put her into a talent school, where she studied acting and singing and dancing. She made her first album by the age of six.

“I only looked it as a hobby, but as I grew older, and became focused, I realized that this is my thing, I should focus on this.”

It was all about her choices, even back then, she adds.

“My parents were the motivators. My parents are the type who let their kids do their own thing, the important thing is that it’s the right way,” said Agnes, who is nine years younger than her only brother.

“Up to now, that is one of the advantages for me; that my parents support me 100 percent.”

She branched out into hosting children’s TV programs, and was chosen as the best kids’ program presenter in 1999. By then she was 13, at the awkward age when most child stars lose the charm factor as the ravages of puberty take over.

“Before I made that transition, we already realized that it would happen,” Agnes said about how her career was planned. “That was the most important thing. We knew there would be a problem; and at that time, only one person handled me, my mother. And she saw from the experience of others … mother had already thought about what needed to be done for my career; so I stopped doing children’s singing and went into soaps.

“That was my stepping-stone, so that people didn’t see me as a child star anymore, but as a soap actor, and then I went back to singing.”

In 2001, she starred in Pernikahan Dini, a TV adaptation of a controversial 1980s novel about teen pregnancy and early marriage. It was a different time, before today’s flood of teen-lit and TV spinoffs, and it was a potentially risky choice.

“Actually, I’ve always liked challenge,” she said.  “When I feel that I am up against it, I am going to give it my best. It was even the case when I was small. I was a little nervous, because I was the lead, the story was a bit controversial and the rest of the cast were senior actors, but it [the insecurity] was only for a few days.”

It was a ratings success, leading to a slew of imitators. Then Agnes and team decided to return to music, debuting her first adult album, And the Story Goes … It included the suggestively titled, catchy Bilang Saja Bila Kau Mau, with an equally provocative video clip with an S+M undertone.  

Child no more, a leather-clad Agnes taunted a man bound to a chair. A flirtation with the dark side, perhaps?

“I was 17 and I wanted to experiment,” she says of the video, later describing herself as “very religious but open-minded”. “That’s me. Maybe some day I want to be feminine, so I will be like that. But the next day I want to be a tomboy, and I will be like that.

“I don’t want to be that every day.”

In December, 2005, she released her second album, Whaddup A?!, with the hit single Bukan Milikmu (Not Yours), which brought her all the awards last year.

A measure of her popularity is her many commercials, from electronic goods to a motorcycle to body spray.  

Agnes, who will be 21 on July 1, is a 15-year industry veteran; she has learned her lessons well, including from hostile run-ins with the powerful infotainment industry when she was a teenager. “I know how to be more diplomatic, how to handle the silly questions now.”

She also knows her detractors are waiting for her to fall on her pretty face – “I see jealousy as a sign of someone’s incapability,” she says – but that is not who she fears the most. Nobody’s perfect after all.

“I am most afraid of myself. I can face the outside threats, like people trying to bring me down. But I am afraid of being static, quiet, of being in my comfort zone. That is when you are vulnerable to ‘enemies’, and open to attack.”

Ultimately, though, it’s all about the big C.

“It comes from my mom, because she said if you don’t believe in yourself, then who will. Because 50 percent of the work is optimism …”

She refuses to categorize herself as a singer over an actress, or vice-versa, but prefers to call herself a “big dreamer”.

“One of the things I don’t like about being Asian is that if we have big dreams, then [others think] we are arrogant. I have a big dream to go international, and I have had it since I was a kid. And I told my mom and she was like, ‘yeah, OK, believe in your dreams’.

“Maybe some people are afraid of telling others of their dreams, because they are scared of being called arrogant, but I don’t care.”

It’s time for Agnes to get back to the set and the interview is done. Throughout the conversation, she has switched back and forth between Indonesian and English, the latter fully formed, fluent sentences, not the celebrity-speak of using the odd hackneyed English phrase.

As I replay the tape the next day, I realize something: Not once has she made a mistake in pronunciation, sentence structure or word choice. Agnes Monica is word perfect.

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