As the Hong Kong Sevens prove, rugby still has a unique place in Hong Kong – but it’s also still largely a sport with male, colonial overtones. Rachel Poon is an exception. The diminutive TVB actress has developed an unlikely love for rugger since taking it up more than a year ago.

“When you start rugby, it’s very hard to play another ball sport,” she says, suggesting that other sports don’t measure up. Though she’s a bit heavy-footed – “I’m not just not fast, I’m slow” – and her tackles are a bit weak, she’s fond of the game’s tactical aspects. “There’s a lot of thinking going on.” She plays scrum-half, which she says suits her “control freak” personality.

Poon, who is soon to graduate from City University with a communications degree, plays for her university’s girls sevens team. The sevens game is not only less physical, so she’s at a lower risk of getting an injury that would jeopardise her acting, but it’s also the only version of rugby available to girls at her university – there simply aren’t enough of them to make up a 15-a-side team.

When she first went to the Sevens as a teenager, she was drawn to Hong Kong Stadium by a common incentive. “The first time I went, it was about getting drunk,” she says. But last year she returned armed with a new appreciation for the sport. “When you’re there for the games, the whole atmosphere is different,” she says. “It’s actually a lot of fun when you go in there and realise how small the world is.”

But aside from getting rough on the field and nearing the try-line for her studies, it’s acting that takes up much of Poon’s time. She’s just finished filming for a dramatic TVB series in which she has a major role. The series, she says, has a script unlike any TVB has had before. “They eat people!” she says in hushed tones.

She’s not joking. The story revolves around a small group of friends who reunite two decades after a traumatic time spent lost deep in a forest. One of the party died during the ordeal, and to ensure their survival the group decided to cannabilise the dead friend.

The 32-episode series, called When Heaven Burns (likely to be released in May or October), was “intense”, says Poon, but it helped restore her respect for the TV entertainment industry. After years of playing minor roles as “someone’s daughter or someone’s sister” in TVB shows, she recently experienced a crisis of confidence in her career. As a devout Christian, she felt the media could sometimes be “this big evil force” that offers moral challenges to the easily swayed. She wasn’t sure she wanted to be a part of that, until a filmmaker friend convinced her to grasp the opportunity in front of her.

But in When Heaven Burns, under the guidance of Chik Kei-yee, “one of the best producers I’ve ever worked with,” she found hope. “It shed new and very positive light on the industry that I didn’t see before.”

Beyond graduation, she’ll have to split her time between her two passions, acting and rugby, both of which she describes as “team sports”. And for the rest? “It’s not time to worry about that yet, because I know God’s going to take care of me.”

Hamish McKenzie