Sawanee Utoomma

Sawanee Utoomma (Thai: สวนีย์ อุทุมมา), known by the nickname Iang (เอี้ยง) and credited in some releases as Sawani Uthumma, is a Thai actor, theatre director and playwright. She is one of the most decorated character actors working in Thai film today, and for readers of this site she is the principal in The Eclipse (2022) and Mata in Flower Boy (2026).

Her screen career runs back to the mid-2000s and was built almost entirely on supporting work: The Palace of Light (2007), Orahan Summer (2008), Death Happens (2009), In the Shadow of the Naga (2010), Panatipata (2010) and 69 (2011). She continued through the 2010s in films including One Day (2016) and The Promise (2017), and in television with a thirty-episode run on Pisard Hansa (2019).

The turning point came in 2021 with The Medium, the Thai-Korean horror film in which she played Nim, a shaman in Isan who narrates much of the story to a documentary crew. The performance won her three separate Thai film awards for a single role:

• Best Supporting Actress, 30th Suphannahong National Film Awards (for the 2021 film year)
• Best Supporting Actress, 12th Thai Film Director Association Awards (covering the 2021 and 2022 film years)
• Best Leading Actress, 19th Starpics Thai Film Awards (2021)

The split is worth noticing. Two juries classified the same performance as supporting and one classified it as leading, which tells you how much of that film she actually carries.

Since then she has worked steadily across Thai and international productions: Bangkok Breaking (2021), The Giver (2022, 26 episodes), The Eclipse (2022, 6 episodes), The Murderer (2023), Thunder Monk (2023), Love in Lies (2023, 18 episodes), The Bride of Naga (2023, 19 episodes), the American science-fiction feature The Creator (2023), The Empress of Ayodhaya (2024, 10 episodes), the anthology Tomorrow and I (2024) and Tharae The Exorcist (2025). Her 2026 slate includes Omukade as Ma-u, Airy in Busan, and Flower Boy as Mata.

Alongside the screen work she is credited as a theatre director and playwright, which is unusual among Thai film actors of her standing and is part of why she reads so differently on screen from performers who came up through television.

BLGLFlix editorial view. Her six episodes as the principal in The Eclipse are one of the most underrated pieces of casting in Thai BL. The genre’s default treatment of adult authority is a cardboard obstacle: a parent or teacher who exists to disapprove for two episodes and then relent. The Eclipse is a series specifically about institutional control, about a school enforcing conformity through rules that nobody in charge can quite justify, and that premise collapses entirely if the person enforcing it plays as a cartoon. Casting an award-winning film actor in a role most BL productions would have handed to a bit player is what lets the show argue with its antagonist rather than simply defeat her. That is the single clearest marker of a BL production taking its own themes seriously, and it is worth watching for: check who a BL series casts in its adult roles, and you will usually be able to predict how seriously it intends to treat its conflict.