WRITTEN BY ESTELLE
Long before their names began appearing side by side, William Jakrapatr Kaewpanpong and Est Supha Sangaworawong were living in two worlds with very little reason to ever meet.
For William, there was music, instruments, singing, bands formed with friends, and eventually studies that allowed him to turn the simple desire to sing into something far more structured. For Est, there was mostly water, training sessions, competitions, and a childhood that gradually came to revolve almost entirely around swimming. One learned early how to step onto a stage. The other learned to swim lap after lap until he reached the point where he was no longer competing only for himself, but for his country.
They were not following the same path, and for a long time, there was little to suggest they would ever end up in the same place. William entered the industry at a young age through music and quickly discovered what it meant to belong to a group. Est spent almost two decades in swimming pools before finding himself in front of a camera almost by chance. When ThamePo: Heart That Skips a Beat brought them together in 2024, William had never carried a series as an actor before, while Est had already been acting for several years without ever being the person around whom an entire story was built. That was where their two journeys finally began to cross.
William grew up in Hat Yai, in southern Thailand. Long before the GMMTV sets, there was already a desire to spend more and more time with music. Several accounts of his younger years trace part of that interest back to The Mask Singer Thailand, after which he began working on his voice and learning instruments including guitar and piano. He also played with other young musicians and joined several student bands, including Broccoli, at a time when all of this still looked more like the experiments of youth than the beginning of a career. William already knew he loved singing and performing in front of people. What he had yet to discover was how far it could take him.
In Bangkok, a few years earlier, Est was growing up with a very different routine. He began swimming at around five years old, and the sport quickly became more than a simple after-school activity. By twelve, he had already entered Thailand’s national youth system, gradually transforming his everyday life. Swimming was no longer simply something he did. It became the point around which everything else had to be organised. In a 2026 interview with GQ Thailand, he described that period himself as nearly eighteen or nineteen years of his life devoted to the water. Before Est Supha became a name associated with television series, there was first a child growing up as an athlete.
For William, music eventually moved beyond the limits of school activities as well. He joined the Young Artist Music Program, or YAMP, at Mahidol University’s College of Music. The specialised pre-college programme allowed him to focus on singing within musical theatre. His training therefore involved not only his voice but everything surrounding it: stage performance, interpretation, and the ability to bring an emotion to life rather than simply sing the right notes. At that point, he had no idea he would eventually become an actor, but his relationship with performance was already taking shape long before his first television role.
Est’s teenage years, meanwhile, took him far from Bangkok. In 2016, at fifteen, he received a full scholarship to attend British International School Phuket and join its BISP Flying Fish swimming programme. The change was immediate. He left his parents to live at boarding school, went from roughly five training sessions a week to nine, and began some days with an alarm ringing at around 4:50 in the morning. On top of that came classes taught entirely in English, a language he explained he still struggled to understand when he first arrived. In an interview with BISP in 2021, he remembered the homesickness, the demanding training schedule and the linguistic adjustment that occupied much of those first few weeks.
Two years later, things already looked very different. His English now allowed him to communicate easily with teachers, coaches and classmates, and living away from home no longer felt quite the same. Sport, however, forced another interruption. A chronic shoulder injury kept him out of the pool for almost six months during his second year. Est used that period to devote more time to his academic results before returning to training at the beginning of 2018. It was still only one chapter in a sporting career that would continue for several more years, but he was already learning how to move forward differently whenever his body temporarily prevented him from doing the one thing around which his days had been built.
Meanwhile, William was approaching a turning point of his own. At the end of 2022, he entered Project Alpha, a television competition created by GMMTV to form a new boy group. Over several months, the contestants were expected to prove far more than their ability to sing. They had to dance, perform, work as a team, and learn how to command a stage in constantly changing configurations. William arrived with a voice already shaped by years of musical training, but the programme also pushed him to broaden everything he needed to be capable of doing around that voice. What had previously belonged to his studies and the small bands he formed with friends was suddenly being evaluated every week in front of professionals and an audience.
In March 2023, William won the competition and was crowned King of Alpha. The finale did not turn him into a solo artist, however. Alongside Nut Thanat, Hong Pichetpong, Tui Chayatorn and Lego Rapeepong, he formed the group that would become LYKN under RISER MUSIC. Their first single, May I?, was released in May 2023, and the months that followed brought a daily life very different from the one he had known only a short time earlier. For the first time, music was no longer simply something he studied or loved doing. It had become his job.
At around the same time, Est’s swimming career was reaching its highest level. After secondary school, he entered Chulalongkorn University’s Faculty of Communication Arts, where he studied Public Relations while continuing to train as a high-level athlete. Some days began much as they had before, with an early training session, followed by classes and then another return to the pool. At eighteen, he joined Thailand’s senior national team and began officially representing his country in international competitions.
Among those competitions were the SEA Games, the Southeast Asian Games, a major multi-sport event where national teams from across the region compete in dozens of disciplines. Reaching that level meant Est was no longer simply an excellent university swimmer. He was one of the athletes selected to represent Thailand. He first competed at the SEA Games with the senior team in 2019, then won a bronze medal in 2022 as part of Thailand’s 4 × 100 metre freestyle relay team, recording what was then a national record. In 2023, other relay teams he competed in set further national records before he also took part in the Asian Games in Hangzhou, this time competing against delegations from across the entire continent.
And throughout all of this, Est continued studying. He completed his bachelor’s degree at Chulalongkorn with first-class honours, the highest academic distinction in his programme. His university years therefore unfolded between training sessions, competitions and classes, leaving very little room for chance. Yet it was precisely during this period that a third activity began entering his life, even though he had never really planned for it.
The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted training schedules and the sporting calendar. In that context, an opportunity to audition appeared. Est gave it a try, was selected, and appeared in Love by Chance 2: A Chance to Love in 2020. When he spoke about the experience to BISP the following year, he still described it as something that had been added to his life as a student and swimmer rather than some great ambition he had been preparing for since childhood. He was simply beginning to discover another environment with its own rules, while swimming continued to occupy a large part of his everyday life.
William, a few years behind him, was learning what it meant to work full-time in the entertainment industry. With LYKN, the songs began to accumulate: UMM UMM, No Worries, Charm, followed by various OSTs, concerts, and collaborations. No Worries even gave the group an early experience with a narrative format close to fiction, although still far removed from filming an actual series. In 2024, William also began recording outside LYKN with Last Twilight, an OST for the series of the same name. For the first time, his name appeared alone on a track, while the rest of his career still largely continued alongside the group’s four other members.
Est, meanwhile, spent several years living with two schedules that seemed to belong to two different people. He continued attending national team training and competing internationally while gradually taking on more acting work. After Love by Chance 2 came projects including Get Rich and Naughty Babe, followed by Beauty Newbie and High School Frenemyafter he joined GMMTV. These were still supporting roles, but film sets slowly stopped feeling like completely unfamiliar places. As early as 2021, he was already describing a daily life in which he had to find room for studying, swimming and filming. He simply did not yet know which of those lives would eventually take over.
The answer did not come immediately. Est first wanted to take his sporting career far enough that he would never have to wonder later what might have happened if he had kept going. The 2023 Asian Games in Hangzhou ultimately became his final major international competition. He left swimming after reaching the senior national team, representing his country, winning a SEA Games medal, and competing in several relay teams that set Thai national records. At twenty-two, he was therefore not walking away from a path that had failed. He was bringing a first career to a close and choosing to devote all his time to the one he had until then been building between training sessions.
That transition did not erase the years that came before it. In his 2026 interview with GQ Thailand, Est explained that swimming had given him discipline, mental resilience, opportunities to travel, and scholarships that supported him throughout much of his education. He also spoke about how entering the entertainment industry forced him to start again with skills he knew far less about: acting, of course, but also singing, dancing, and certain aspects of public communication. For years, his progress could be measured with a stopwatch. Now he had entered a profession where no one could give him a precise time to beat in order to know whether he had performed a scene well enough.
At almost the same moment, William found himself facing a similarly unfamiliar challenge. He was already used to audiences, rehearsals, promotional cameras and the pressure that comes with being part of a rising group. He was also beginning to take up more musical space under his own name, first with Last Twilight and soon with other OSTs. But until then, whenever he had been asked to perform, music had almost always been his starting point. In 2024, a new project would ask him to keep all of that experience while learning an entirely different language.
On April 23, 2024, GMMTV unveiled ThamePo: Heart That Skips a Beat as part of its UP&ABOVE Part 2 line-up. William was cast as Thame, while Est was given the role of Po. For William, it was the first major acting role of his career. For Est, who had been working in television since 2020, it was the first time a series had placed him so firmly at its centre. After years spent moving in almost opposite directions, they arrived on the same project with each of them already familiar with one part of the job and still needing to discover another.
ThamePo begins with Po, a young documentary filmmaker who has recently been left by his boyfriend, who criticises him, among other things, for not being accomplished enough. His new job brings him into the world of MARS, a boy group on the verge of breaking apart, whose leader, Thame is expected to leave for Korea to launch a solo career. At first, Po sees him as a man so focused on his own success that he is willing to leave the others behind. He soon discovers a far more complicated story: members who have grown apart, decisions made under pressure, and a leader whose career does not always leave him free to choose for himself. As they slowly try to bring the group back together, Thame and Po begin growing closer as well.
William entered that story surrounded by faces he knew by heart. Nut, Hong, Tui and Lego, his four LYKN bandmates, became the other four members of MARS. Rehearsals, conversations between members of a group, or the way one person’s decision can disrupt the lives of four others therefore belonged not only to the script he had just been handed, but also to things he had experienced since the beginning of his professional career. Thame, however, began asking something different of him the moment MARS stepped away from the stage.
That was where William truly began learning how to be an actor. Onstage, he had spent years projecting his voice and energy towards an entire room. With Thame, some scenes required almost the opposite. A look held for one second longer, a hesitation in front of Po or a line delivered much more quietly could sometimes be enough to move the character forward. He no longer needed to fill the space. Instead, he had to allow the camera to find something much smaller. And opposite him was Est, arriving with several years of filming experience already behind him while discovering, in turn, what it meant to remain at the centre of the frame for so long.
Since Love by Chance 2, Est had learned his way around a set in fragments, one role at a time and often from the edges of the story. Po required him to stay. Across thirteen episodes, he had to follow the same character, maintain the continuity of everything Po had experienced the week before, and bring meaning to all the moments he watched before answering. Po sometimes listens more than he speaks, allowing Est to build much of the character through reactions rather than large gestures. While William was learning how to reduce the energy of the stage for the camera, Est was learning what that camera demanded when it remained on him long enough for silence to matter as much as dialogue.
Their way of working together was built there, gradually, throughout filming, long before WilliamEst became a name printed across fancon posters. William arrived carrying the stage, music and the dynamics of being in a group with him. Est arrived with several years of camera experience and a discipline developed long before his first role. ThamePo did not ask either of them to become the other. It simply placed them opposite each other for long enough that both could grow within the part of the profession they knew least.
When the series began airing on December 13, 2024, audiences were therefore discovering Thame and Po, but also William as a lead actor and Est in his first leading role. Across the thirteen episodes, their work gradually began moving beyond the fiction itself. William performed 5CM, naturally returning to the territory that had belonged to him long before Thame. Est recorded Your Last, even though only a few years earlier singing had still been one of the skills he said he needed to learn when entering the industry. Their two voices then came together on Good Time.
The series ended in March 2025, but their work together did not stop with its final episode. In July came Love Echo, a track now directly credited to William and Est. Only a few months earlier, their voices had still been accompanying Thame and Po. Now, the song carried their own names. And in August, the duo moved to a different scale altogether with the WE Magnetic FANCON, held on August 9 and 10, 2025 at Union Hall. Both dates sold out.
For William, spending several hours onstage was already part of a world he knew through LYKN. For Est, it was far more recent territory. Only a few years earlier, his biggest public events had taken place beside a swimming pool as he waited for the starting signal. Now, his work also involved songs, choreography, interactions with an entire audience and a stage shared with William. The difference between their backgrounds did not disappear when they began working together. If anything, it continued to follow them, with each of them still entering certain spaces with far more experience than the other.
And even as WilliamEst began taking up considerably more space, neither of their careers came to revolve around the pairing alone. William naturally continued his work with LYKN, whose first studio album, Dusk & Dawn, was released in 2025, while also pursuing his own music. In 2026, Flashback allowed him to go a little further than simply performing, as he also contributed to its concept and writing. After beginning as a musical theatre student, winning Project Alpha and finding his place within a boy group, he gradually began to leave more personal traces in the music released under his own name.
He also developed a project away from the stage with ZAVEN, a fashion brand. Est, meanwhile, explored several worlds far removed from the one in which he had spent his childhood: Middle Riddle in fashion and lifestyle, Haus of Bloom around flowers, followed by Lumi Matcha Atelier in 2026. For someone who, only a few years earlier, described having learned almost everything through a single field swimming his professional life was now filled with activities that had not existed at all in his first one.
After ThamePo, their shared journey took a slight detour as well. Rather than immediately returning with another series built entirely around them, William and Est joined Me and Thee, led by Pond Naravit and Phuwin Tangsakyuen. William became Rome, Thee’s younger brother, while Est played Mok. For the first time since Thame and Po had placed them at the centre of the audience’s attention, they returned to supporting characters and a much lighter, more extravagant and family-oriented universe. They were still filming together, but this time without having to carry every episode on their shoulders.
Peach and Me extended that universe in 2026 and brought them back under the same character names. Rome took on greater responsibilities within the Arseni family, Mok remained by his side, and both William and Est were able to spend a little more time with characters who asked none of the things Thame and Po had demanded from them. Meanwhile, William continued his work with LYKN and his musical projects, while Est kept filming, performing and appearing at concerts, including as a guest at the POND PHUWIN Space Soul-dyssey CONCERT in August 2026. Their professional lives therefore continued moving both together and separately, without either direction needing to cancel the other out.
Then came You Maniac. Two years after ThamePo was announced, William and Est returned for the second time as the leads of a series together, but Dean and Moth have very little in common with the characters who first brought them together. Dean, played by William, is sociable, loves to party, knows how to charm people and is perfectly comfortable with seduction as long as nobody starts taking things too seriously. Moth, played by Est, is an artist who is far harder to impress. When Dean decides to seduce him in order to divert his attention away from Punn, a kind of game begins between them: each can provoke the other, but whoever falls in love first loses.
At the time of writing, the series has not yet begun airing, making it impossible to say exactly what William and Est will ultimately do with these characters. But their starting point has already changed. William is no longer arriving on set with only a handful of narrative experiences around LYKN and the stage as his main territory. He now has Thame and Rome behind him. Est is no longer arriving with a succession of supporting roles and the swimming pool still close in his rear-view mirror. He has carried Po, played Mok, recorded his own OSTs and spent several nights performing onstage in front of his audience.
And perhaps this is where we can most clearly find the two boys from the beginning of this story again.
Before WilliamEst, there was William in Hat Yai, learning how to sing and play several instruments before finding himself in a competition that would transform his life within a matter of months. There was Est in Bangkok and later Phuket, beginning his days before five in the morning so he could train before class, with the goal of going far enough to one day represent Thailand. Neither of them was following a road that seemed destined to meet the other.
Then music led William to LYKN. Swimming led Est to the national team, before an audition opened a door he had never planned for. A few years later, those two roads met on the same set, just as William still had to learn how to become an actor and Est still had to discover what it meant to carry a story from beginning to end.
ThamePo gave them that first meeting.
Everything that followed simply continued the story. And today, behind the name WilliamEst, there are still, above all, two individual journeys that have never stopped moving forward in their own directions and that, since 2024, have also learned how to move forward together.
What comes next is still unwritten, somewhere between the paths they will continue to build on their own and the ones they may choose to walk together again.