Cris Villonco on love and the hole in her heart
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On her own: “I’m pro-RH bill and
I’m very vocal about it,” Cris Villonco shares. “We are all opinionated.
Very. Extremely,” she says of her dad Opap, mother Monique, sisters
Dara and Tere, and other relatives.
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You may remember her as the bubbly, bright-eyed girl from
that Pop Cola commercial. Today, she still is doe-eyed and baby faced, but all
grown up. A notable theater actress and one of Manila’s most eligible young women, here are
10 things you should know about Cris Villonco.
1. She was born with
a hole in her heart.
“I don’t know exactly the specifics but I know I was a blue
baby, and that I had a heart murmur,” Cris reveals. “Maybe my mother was
smoking or stressed or something,” she jokes about the time her mom was
actively working as a TV producer. Cris vividly remembers going for an ECG and
a 2D every year, until she was diagnosed as okay when she was five years old.
“I just don’t do anything extremely strenuous, that’s why sports was never my
thing.”
Cris was actually named after Kris Aquino, and she shares,
“That was the time Ninoy died and she was the very vocal one, so my dad was so
cho chong cho cho (crazy) about that.”
2. Cris only
discovered her talent for singing when she auditioned for a role in Les
Miserables when she was nine.
Cris didn’t really perform nor sing as a young child. “I
just came from New York
where my mom took me to my first three shows ever: Miss Saigon, Phantom, and
Les Miz. I fell in love with all three. When we got home, my sister said, ‘You
know today is the last day of auditions?’ And for some strange reason I just
said, ‘Okay, I want to do it,’” she recalls. She ended up being cast as one of
seven little Cosettes.
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In 2000, she was featured in Time magazine’s “Hero for the
Planet” issue. “There were not too many child singers then so I would be called
to sing for all these charities: Bantay Bata, Habitat for Humanity, Piso Para
sa Pasig, the
APEC. At that time a journalist took interest, thinking, ‘Wow, she is able to
influence a lot of people through song.’ From age of nine to 16 I had siguro 10
theme songs. They flew me over to San
Francisco to meet Haley Joel Osment, Charlotte
Church.” Later that year, she was invited Jose Mari Chan to sing alongside for
the OFWs in Rome,
in a Mass officiated by the late Pope John Paul II.
When asked if she realized the gravity of her achievements
for her age, Cris says: “That time I was more like, ‘Why doesn’t this boy like
me, what am I going to wear to the prom?’ I didn’t realize how much of a
privilege it was to let things happen as they did.” She shares that her mom was
instrumental in her staying grounded. “She didn’t want me to feel like
‘magaling ako,’ she was always the type who would say, ‘There will always be
people better than you, and there are times that you will be better than
them.’”
3. On having Armida
Siguion-Reyna as a grandmother: “That’s a tough question. There is only one
star.”
“A lot of people say the reason I got to this point is
because of her,” she says. On the worst criticism she ever got: “For me the
most painful, which is still said to this day: that some of my shows are funded
by my family. There will always, always be someone saying that about me. It just
doesn’t end.” She says her lola Armida, who she fondly calls “Mahal,” didn’t
even know that she was auditioning for Les Miserables. Even Fernando Poe, Jr.
didn’t know Cris was Armida’s granddaughter when he cast her in his movie Ang
Dalubhasa.
“One thing I can say about my lola is I thank her for my
diction in Tagalog and for singing the way I do. She’s a stickler for pitch and
for correct pronunciation!”
4. She used her first
name Anna instead of Cris when she moved to New York for college. “When I left, I was
angry. I was like, ‘Bakit, magaling naman ako ah?’”
Leaving Manila
to study college in Sarah Lawrence was her mom’s idea, not hers. When asked
what prompted her mom to suggest it (she had been set to enroll in Ateneo de
Manila), she says, “I think I was so unhappy. Very unhappy. In the industry,
there were promises that never happened. It was very frustrating.” Cris was
really set on going the whole mainstream teleserye and movie route, but when
the “promises” weren’t kept, she decided to just up and leave. “There were a
lot of up-and-coming artists, and they were into the whole Britney and
Christina thing. And I was always the losyang, wholesome girl,” she shares.
“They tried to make me one, but it just didn’t happen.”
She preferred to be called “Anna” to detach from her showbiz
persona. “I graduated with a liberal arts degree concentrating on economic
development and music. I didn’t want to have anything to do with performing,”
she explains. When she came back to Manila,
she worked for two NGOs — Center for Humanitarian Dialogue and Asia Society —
but after a year, she decided to go back to theater. “Not showbiz, just
theater. That’s my first love anyway.”
5. Her thoughts on
being in showbiz at such a young age: “I think it was self-imposed pressure, I
wanted to be this perfect kid.”
She says that going away for college where nobody knew her
or nobody cared who she was made her realize who she really is. “That was the
first time I realized, wow, I’m this person pala. And there are people who can
actually love me for me,” she shares. “This was at the time of my parents’
separation, realizing that time that, yes, may pagka-laos na ako, and I just
felt, ‘Okay lang pala.’ May natanggal na fear, realizing you don’t have to be
perfect all the time.”
6. Cris Villonco in
numbers:
21: Number of musicals and straight plays done. She names
Les Miz (her first), Alikabok (“First time I was recognized as a theater
actress”), Orosman at Zafira (“That show made me viable for a lead”) and The
Sound of Music (she starred as Maria) as her most memorable projects.
4: Number of awards won for music and theater.
3: Number of albums recorded (the last of which, her
self-titled album “Cris,” was recorded during her college days and when she was
traveling back and forth from New York to Manila.)
30: Number of Playbills in her collection (“My last trip to New York, I watched 19
shows!”).
4: Liters of water she consumes in one show.
7. She admits to
having been involved two times in a “showmance,” or show romance.
“It happens! You’re in an enclosed space for this amount of
time, you get to know each other, the problems you are facing; of course
there’s a connection,” she explains. She reveals the first was with co-actor
Jeffrey Hidalgo when she was 16, and the second with co-actor Niccolo Manahan,
who she was together with for five years. “My parents and my sisters feel,
‘Cris, you have to be alone,’ there’s always been someone already. They’re just
really happy that for the past two months, there has been no one.”
On rumors of being linked to Sen. Chiz Escudero and Mayor
Junjun Binay: “I think it’s because Chiz and Jun have been very close to the
family. We really don’t know where that came from.”
8. She was friends
with KC Concepcion and Stephanie Zubiri in high school and recalls, “There were
people who would ignore us in school but when we’re out in public would say
hi.”
“We became close at the time because we were in the
limelight, whether or not wanted it,” Cris shares. “It was a very interesting
situation to be in. You’re earning money, you have tapings instead of hanging
out with friends. Having that kind of life at that age is tough kasi you also
just want to be like everybody else.” She says that knowing who is genuine to
you is more of a gut feel, and reveals that she did realize which of her
friends were sincere and which were not.
9. On political
opinions within her family: “Kanya-kanya. We get into fights, it gets
personal.”
She says she has never been pressured to take the same side
on an issue as her granduncle, Senator Juan Ponce-Enrile. “I’m pro-RH bill and
I’m very vocal about it,” Cris shares. “We are all opinionated. Very.
Extremely,” she says of her dad Opap, mother Monique, sisters Dara and Tere,
and other relatives. At what point do the heated arguments stop? “Silence,” she
laughs.
She vividly remembers bullets flying over their Makati home during the
coup d’état of 1989. “When we would hide in the cabinets, my mom said we were
playing hide and seek. Teddy Boy Locsin is a good friend of my parents and at
that time stayed with us for a few nights. A friend of his sent a bulletproof
car and we all rode in it. A bullet struck the window and I remember my mom
telling me it was a bird! It was a good thing I believed everything she told me
at that age!”
10. Best advice she
has been given: “I love it when my mom tells me, ‘You don’t have to understand
anything, just do your part.’”
She recently played a supporting role in an episode of
Maalala Mo Kaya, and reveals that what she thought was going to be tough on her
ego, wasn’t. “I think there was a turning point last year when I did Sound of
Music. There was a lot of pressure. To be compared to a West
End actress and singer, to be the lead in a three-hour show, it
was too much for me. It took a toll on my health and my voice,” she reveals.
“That’s when I realized I don’t like being a star pala. I’m not like that pala,
I thought I was.”
She shares she would love to do more television work, saying
she wants to balance theater with mainstream acting. “Not to make this a
political issue, but no matter how good it is now, theater is struggling.” She
wants to lessen theater performing, and instead venture into producing. “I’m
actually putting up a theater production company with friends called Red
Turnip. We felt that English straight plays were dying, and we also wanted
something in connection with how society is today, a little more risqué in
terms of scenes and content. And we want it in unconventional spaces.”
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http://www.philstar.com/sunday-life/2012-11-25/872591/cris-villonco-love-and-hole-her-heart
