Thai actress, screenwriter and creator Goy Arachaporn opens up about embracing a gentler pace at 32, protecting the relationships that matter, and learning to spend her energy with greater intention.
Thai entertainment has grown more hospitable to the multi-hyphenate: the actress who writes, the writer who performs, the public figure who can turn a friendship into a successful digital platform and still find time to make music. Goy Arachaporn Pokinpakorn has done all of those things. Her career has spanned television, film, screenwriting, online content and music, with the openness of someone who seldom saw a reason not to try. Now, at 32, she is growing more interested in the reasons to say no.
When asked which chapter of her life she is in, Goy doesn’t frame it around a new role or an ambitious professional milestone. ‘It’s the chapter where I try to choose what’s best for me,’ she says. ‘Before, I explored a lot and took every opportunity. Now I’m learning to be more selective. My body is asking me to slow down a little and decide what I want to spend my energy on.’
The answer reveals more about her present state than any list of forthcoming projects could. After years of discovering what she could do, she wants to be more mindful about what deserves her time.
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Her appetite for trying things was more than a strategy to remain visible. ‘I have a lot of curiosity about life,’ she explains. Acting remains the work she loves most, but the impulse behind it has always extended beyond the craft itself. She is drawn to people – why they behave as they do and which stories allow an audience to understand them differently – and that same interest eventually led her towards writing, music and the conversational, personality-driven world of online content.
Goy first became widely known through ‘Hormones: The Series,’ the Thai teen drama that brought sensitive subjects into mainstream conversation with unusual openness. She went on to appear in ‘Faces of Anne,’ ‘I Promised You the Moon’ and ‘The Red Envelope,’ and behind the camera, she later joined the writing team of ‘I Told Sunset About You,’ one of Thailand’s most internationally recognised coming-of-age series.
In hindsight, the breadth of her work can look like the outcome of a carefully mapped-out career. Goy herself frames it in plainer terms: she followed her curiosity, and when an opportunity came up, she took it. Acting, however, gave her an early realisation that none of the other forms quite matched. She remembers playing someone she initially disliked before finding that the work shook her certainty. ‘I had to become this person, and acting made me understand them more,’ she says. ‘That was the first time I felt a spark in my head. It gave me a new perception of people.’
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That realisation still drives her as an actor. The work doesn’t appeal to her because it gives her control; if anything, acting demands the opposite. She has to enter another person’s logic and set aside her first judgement long enough to see what might sit beneath it, and in doing so, she often finds a route back to herself. ‘Acting makes me feel more connected to myself.’ she says. It may sound paradoxical at first, but it makes sense once she explains it. Inhabiting somebody else exposes the assumptions she carries into the room.
Writing grew out of the same impulse. Reading scripts left her wondering about the decisions behind them – and whether she had stories of her own to tell.
Friends and colleagues encouraged her to try. She first wrote for the stage before moving into series work, where the scale of the commitment became apparent. A script can occupy nine months to a year, requiring sustained concentration as the story develops through each stage. Goy found the process both exciting and rewarding, though its demands have made her more selective about when and why she returns to it.
‘I think I’ll write again,’ she says, ‘but it takes so much time. If I choose to do it, it means I have something I really want to tell and something I’m deeply interested in.’ She feels no need to manufacture a project just to keep the title of screenwriter. She’ll return when the story warrants it.
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This evolving sense of what deserves her time also shapes GoyNattyDream, the YouTube channel she shares with close friends Natty and Dream. The trio’s friendship predates the channel by years; at the time of our conversation, they had known one another for 13 years and worked together on the platform for six. With more than two million subscribers, the channel is a substantial business – not simply a by-product of friends spending time together. Its success comes with familiar complications: money, deadlines, audience expectations and the strain of keeping personal chemistry commercially viable.
Goy believes the friendship has endured because they never had to spell out the one principle that mattered most – the friendship comes first. ‘We have the same core values,’ she says. ‘We value the friendship more than the benefit.’ There was no formal pact at the beginning – just an understanding that came naturally and then had to be maintained once their private relationship became work, where communication and respect remain fundamental.
Working with close friends can blur the line between personal feelings and professional responsibilities, which is why Goy sees honest communication as essential. The affection visible on camera may draw viewers in, but sustaining the partnership also means being willing to disagree, say what they mean and ensure the channel’s interests never take priority over the friendship itself. After six years of creating content together and 13 years of friendship, the latter remains the measure of success she values most.
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Entering her thirties has made these priorities harder to overlook. In her twenties, Goy felt she had enough energy to pursue everything that interested her, and her body usually kept pace. At 32, she has become more aware of her limits: late nights take longer to recover from, physical changes are becoming noticeable, and schedules she once managed without much thought now affect her more. Rather than viewing this negatively, she takes it as a signal to be more discerning about what she commits to.
‘You’re still young, but not that young any more,’ she says with a laugh. ‘In your twenties, you can go to a pub and wake up in the morning. Now I can’t.’ The joke points to a broader change in how she wants to spend this decade: health and peace now matter more than squeezing another commitment into an already crowded week. She wants to reserve her energy for creative work that genuinely holds her interest, instead of saying yes simply because the opportunity may not return.
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For Goy, preserving that sense of peace requires boundaries around how much access outside opinions have to her daily life, how often she checks social media and whether public reaction is allowed to influence private decisions. Those boundaries have become more difficult to maintain as her romantic life has drawn greater attention, turning ordinary expressions of affection into moments that strangers analyse and assign meaning to.
Goy admits she initially felt unsure about how much affection to show publicly. She worried that others might see her as excessive or ‘too much,’ then began questioning why their judgement mattered. The discomfort, she realised, came less from public affection itself than from imagining how strangers might respond.
Eventually, she turned her attention back to the relationship and asked what would make the person she loves feel happy and cared for. ‘People will always have opinions, and those opinions belong to them,’ she says. ‘What matters is communicating with the person you love and continuing to make each other happy.’ She is not pretending the commentary does not exist; she is refusing to let it influence how she behaves with her partner.
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Keeping outside opinions in their proper place becomes more challenging when social media is also part of her work. Following trends, understanding her audience and staying informed all have professional value, but constant scrolling can blur the point at which useful information turns into distraction. Rather than leaving social media altogether, Goy limits how much of it she consumes, taking regular breaks so she can process her own thoughts before absorbing everyone else’s.
Journalling gives her another private space to do that. By recording what happened each day and how it affected her, she can better understand her reactions and identify which moments or interactions drained her. ‘Journalling helps me reflect on what I’m thinking and what happened each day,’ she says. ‘It helps me identify what felt toxic and feel more at peace.’
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For Goy, freedom now means having enough confidence to make decisions on her own terms. She can turn down work without seeing it as failure, protect a friendship when business enters the picture and conduct her relationship according to the people in it rather than those watching from outside. Her ambition has not diminished; she has simply stopped believing that she must accept every opportunity to prove it.
At 32, she judges progress less by the number of projects she completes and more by whether her commitments still feel worthwhile. ‘I try to choose what’s best for me,’ she says. The words may sound self-evident, yet living by them requires confidence that passing on an opportunity will not diminish what she has already achieved. Goy spent her twenties discovering everything she could do. Her thirties are about deciding what she still wants to do – and giving herself permission to leave the rest behind.
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Catherine Pun
A Hong Kong native with Filipino-Chinese roots, Catherine infuses every part of her life with zest, whether she’s belting out karaoke tunes or exploring off-the-beaten-path destinations. Her downtime often includes unwinding with Netflix and indulging in a 10-step skincare routine. As the Editorial Director of Friday Club., Catherine brings her wealth of experience from major publishing houses, where she refined her craft and even authored a book. Her sharp editorial insight makes her a dynamic force, always on the lookout for the next compelling narrative.
