Bea Alonzo Interview on Eerie, Rediscovering Herself, and More

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We’re following Bea Alonzo up and down a hotel hallway like a dolly crew on a movie set. We pause as she poses by a window, and roll on as she advances toward the next photo. In this setup, she’s been told to fish out her cell phone from a basket full of dirty hotel towels headed for the wash. Literally: dirty laundry. Alonzo complies. “It’s wet,” she says, laughingly, as she plucks out her phone from the heap of wet cotton and sundry human dirt. She does this gamely, without curled toes or any apparent misgivings.

PHOTO: E.S.L. CHEN

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As with any star, there’s always the question you’re dying to ask, and the question you end up asking. It’s a question that almost always has to do with dirty laundry—especially the material it’s made of, as well as what sticks to it. Today, it’s a mixture of cotton and linen, dirt and heartbreak; it also has to do with an actor who shall not be named because this is all about Bea. The way to segue into that question is to first ask about her movies.

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But Bea, you find, does not want to talk about a genre she’s helped define over the years, and one which has arguably applied to her real life. I’m talking, of course, about the hugot movie, which is a kind of melodrama specific to the Philippines. The word literally means to draw out. But as with many terms in social media culture, today it means another thing altogether: a phenomenology of heartbreak. Think of a break-up crystallized into its bare essence, given a quotable one-liner, and made into a hashtag—or stretched into a movie.

PHOTO: E.S.L. CHEN

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Dress and shoes by Carolina Herrera

It’s a topic Alonzo wants to steer clear of, but only after the star has had one hugot moment herself.

“I’m so over it,” she says, “baka mag feeling-guwapo pa ‘yung ex ko… Leaving somebody without saying goodbye is such an asshole thing to do. I’m sorry but I can’t think of a perfect word for it—it’s so disrespectful.”

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Now here’s another term: ghosting. It means leaving somebody without saying goodbye, yes, but it also broadens into a kind of sudden death—to cut off any kind of contact suddenly and without explanation.

PHOTO: E.S.L. CHEN

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The only thing worse than ghosting, or being ghosted, is to have its messy aftermath play out on social media, where a cryptic post made by Alonzo addressing the issue snowballed into a kind of Becky with the good hair moment, with the rumored third party handling the situation via lengthy PR statements in the form of successive text posts on Instagram.

But Alonzo comes to the interview composed and vigilant, even as she doesn’t appear to be sticking to any kind of script. She’s also paired a royal blue suit with white sneakers—an ensemble that indicates she means business, but also that she’s flexible. It’s the kind of comportment that sat well with the local audience during the year’s baddest romantic upset.

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PHOTO: E.S.L. CHEN

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Suit by Deliver Deliver Daily, shoes by Carolina Herrera

Alonzo is, without a doubt, a local pride—as much a Filipino sweetheart as Meg Ryan was an American one in all those beloved Ephron films in the ’80s and the ’90s. She doesn’t so much as shine as inspire big, cinematic feelings nationally. Which is why it feels almost bittersweet when she is internationally recognized as a top talent in Asia, with Variety magazine naming her as one of its Up Next: Asian Stars. To be written up as a local talent who can cross over to a foreign market spawns mixed feelings. There’s pride, of course, in the fact that an international audience has taken notice. But there’s also a kind of strange, endearing possessiveness to be found in her fans and followers, who may not want to share her with the rest of the world just yet.

PHOTO: E.S.L. CHEN

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Perhaps this territorial ours and yours began in 2007, when Alonzo starred in One More Chance, a strong box office draw, forecasting the sweeping popularity of the mainstream hugot movies that would dominate the next decade. Before 2014’s That Thing Called Tadhana, John Lloyd Cruz’s Popoy and Alonzo’s Basha had already defined the eminently quotable, gut-and-heart-roiling hugot flick, spouting one-liners that meant to hurt in a paradoxically cathartic way. Who didn’t bristle when post-break-up Popoy moves on from Basha to another girl, while still loyally declaring: She loved me at my worst. You had me at my best.

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At this cinematic moment, Alonzo is ready to move on—the way all of us, at some point or other, move on from thankless couplings or uncouplings and all the poetic feelings they engender. More than anything, Alonzo is ready for what’s next: game in this shoot to rifle through a big basket of soiled hotel linens—“baka sperm!” she whispered in horror as she touched a damp towel.

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PHOTO: E.S.L. CHEN

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Now, finally, Alonzo is game for an international audience. Not three days before, we saw her in Unbreakable, a female counterpart of a bromance flick, where she plays the straight man to Angelica Panganiban’s comic. It’s a love story the way Frozen is a love story, or the way Beaches is a love story—a movie that makes sisterhood (elective or otherwise) its main plot point.

This may make for a less profitable narrative in these parts, but it’s one that might prove as essential to the chick flick as your average rom-com. Sometimes a man is thrown into the mix, not so much as a lead but as an obstacle getting in the way of an intention.

PHOTO: E.S.L. CHEN

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Top by MSGM at Distinqt, pants by Jaz Cerezo

Unbreakable is the kind of movie we don’t often see Alonzo star in: It leaves us satisfied but not happy. For most of her career, Alonzo has almost always played the virtuous love interest: the one who sends her siblings through school, or the financially disadvantaged girl leaping high hurdles to win the guy. Said hurdles usually include a loony ex-wife, a quarter-life crisis, or a snooty mother-in-law.

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It’s Mikhail Red’s Eerie, however, that’s launched Alonzo into the heady air of the international arena. Red’s homage to the horror movie perhaps does the genre one better by recasting classical tropes with the originality of his eye and his sinister moodiness. Can there actually be anything eerier than a movie titled Eerie? one might ask.

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One doesn’t mind the convent school setting, the ghost-in-the-mirror trickery, or even the appearance of twins. It’s either Western Horror Film 101 for a Filipino audience accustomed to the genre being done in the Shake, Rattle and Roll vein, or it’s the genre’s campy twin (more hair-raising, of course, than humorous). As either or both, it works. Especially when you see Alonzo stepping out of her comfort zone and playing a guidance counselor both petrified by, and sympathetic to, girl ghosts.

PHOTO: E.S.L. CHEN

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Prior characters Alonzo has played were often collaborations between the actress and the scriptwriter, with the former having minimal control over character portrayal. But in Eerie, she holds her own against screen queen Charo Santos’ high nun who sends convent girls off the deep end with midnight mea culpas in front of many-candled altars. It also happens to be one of Alonzo’s favorite characters. “I enjoyed doing Pat because it was the first time Star Cinema gave me the freedom to work on my character alone.”

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This new kind of artistic freedom has allowed Alonzo to discover who she is as an actor—one capable of depth and nuance, instead of one playing the predictable one-note, cut-out character. “I want to see my range as an actress. I want to know what kind of actress I am—what my drive and purpose here are,” she says, saying the word actress like a sacred mantra.

This is also the kind of freedom that applies to her personal life, and one that yields the same liberating results. “I’m rediscovering myself right now—that’s actually what I’m excited about. I’ve always been in a relationship, that’s the thing, [so] it’s very liberating that, right now, I’m setting my goals just for me. I don’t have to think of another person; right now, all I want is to do a lot of movies and see if they can compete outside the country.”

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Top and bra by Dion Lee at Distinqt, pants by Jaz Cerezo

It’s a tricky thing being a mainstream star with independent film aspirations—to know at once where the serious roles are and on which side your bread is buttered. After her turn in Eerie, and even during this shoot, Alonzo is ready to do the trickiest of things.

As of this writing, she is in talks with directors of at least two independent films, and is almost sure to star in an Erik Matti film in 2020.

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What she has achieved, in her new roles and in real life, is agency: the ability to decide one’s direction and to direct one’s power. More than anything these days, Alonzo is character-driven. There’s no plot, after all, in life—you can be ghosted, you can do the ghosting, you can be the bida, or the contrabida. Bea Alonzo has learned this and Bea Alonzo is teaching us this. “I didn’t know that the one thing that could kill me could actually bring me back to life,” she says. “I’ve never felt so alive.”

PHOTO: E.S.L. CHEN

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In this story: Produced by Clifford Olanday and Paolo Chua • Photographs by E.S.L. Chen • Styling by Loris Peña • Interview by Mookie Katigbak Lacuesta • Makeup by Anthea Bueno • Hair by Brent Sales • Production assistant Roland Mae Tanglao • Shot on location at Hilton Manila

Bea Alonzo Defined Hugot—Let's Move On