Five Questions With Making the Band's Bryan Chan

By Christine Champagne
COLUMNIST FROM GIST.COM

Imagine going from working a 9-to-5 job to being groomed as a potential pop superstar. Well, the eight lucky guys featured on ABC's Making the Band (Fridays, 9:30 p.m. ET) are living that dream.

Gist recently spoke with one of them, Bryan Chan,a 25-year-old Californian who was plucked from obscurity and given the chance to become a member of a pop group being put together by Lou Pearlman, the mastermind behind Backstreet Boys, 'N Sync and LFO.

How long did it take you to adjust to having a camera crew following your every move?
"You never fully accept it, but it does get easier. After the first week, we learned not to censor ourselves because people are going to see if you're being phony."
Were you encouraged to act a certain way?
"We were told throughout the whole thing by everybody involved, 'Just to be yourself.' Literally, [the camera crews] were flies on the wall."
Are you ready to deal with fame?
"Probably not. I don't think that you can be prepared for that. I think the hard part of what our experience is going to yield is people are going to come up to us and say, 'Why did you act that way when Erik got p---ed off at you?' or 'Why are you always sleeping in when you know you should be rehearsing?' People are going to be commenting on our traits and our lives, and that's going to be hard. And I think that's going to be hard for us, especially when we see it on TV and see the reality of it. I think the hardest thing for anybody to do is step back and see yourself as other people view you."
Are there any special moments you'll always remember from this experience?
"I would say the highlight of this whole experience was definitely meeting Jennifer Love Hewitt at our New Year's Eve party at Planet Hollywood. I really like her as an actress. I'm a big fan. I have been for a while. She is dating LFO's Rich Cronin.... And I went up, and I introduced myself to Rich because at that point I still hadn't met Rich yet either. And he said, 'I'd like to introduce you to my girlfriend Jennifer.' And I turned to Jennifer, and I shook her hand, and I said, 'Hi.' And then I just turned around and walked away. This whole celebrity thing and meeting people is still very new, and you have to keep in mind we're all raw talent. This is all very new to us. So, to be thrown into the presence of people we've admired for a long time, that's what kind of reaction they're going to get: We get speechless.
Only five of you guys will be chosen to be in the band. How do you think you'll react if you aren't picked?
Regardless of whether we make it or not, [this show] is going to open up doors for us. What better résumé can you have than a national show that shows how well you dance and sing? So, I think everybody wins either way. I think, though, in everybody's mind the ideal thing that we would want to happen would be to be a part of this group because we wouldn't be here otherwise.