JOHN ARCILLA
For his role as the journalist Sisoy Salas in the 208-minute crime thriller On the Job: The Missing 8, veteran actor John Arcilla put the Filipino stamp on the coveted Volpi Cup at the 78th Venice Film Festival. Arcilla’s name is placed on the roster of internationally renowned artists who bagged the same title for their exemplary performances on screen. Past winners of the Cup are Hollywood’s who’s-who, such as Sean Penn, Ben Affleck, Brad Pitt, Adam Driver, Joaquin Phoenix and Willem Dafoe.
As a young boy in Baler, Aurora, Arcilla had limited things to entertain him; he only relied on his imagination and the company of his loving family. “We stayed in a house in the middle of a coconut plantation,” he recalled. “That’s how my imagination grew wilder. Every night I would look up the ceiling and imagine myself performing on stage, being on television and shaking hands with people.”
Before reaching the big screen, Arcilla was first a theatre actor under the Tanghalang Pilipino, the resident theatre company of the Cultural Center of the Philippines’ (CCP). There, he was able to play leading roles in Orosman at Zafira and in National Artist Ryan Cayabyab’s Rizal musical trilogy: El Filibusterismo (1993), Noli Me
Tángere (1995) and Illustrado (1996). Later, Arcilla joined the Actors Workshop Foundation.
Contrary to what many of his new fans know, Arcilla’s big break was not his portrayal of Philippine General Antonio Luna in Jerrold Tarog’s historical biopic Heneral Luna. He first became a talent for a food commercial where he repeatedly uttered: “coffee na lang, dear [just coffee, my dear]”.
The wildly successful commercial caught the attention of different gag and night-time shows and eventually opened opportunities for Arcilla. “After Tanghalang Pilipino, I got this commercial ‘coffee na lang, dear’ [just coffee, dear]. That opened a lot of doors for me because the phrase became a household tagline, a lot of Filipinos spoofed it,” he said.
The acting experiences that Arcilla had in the past brought him to where he is today. The Volpi Cup holder shared that there was an outpour of congratulatory remarks the morning he received the good news. Arcilla’s win at the Venice Film Fest has set a premise among equally-talented Southeast Asian actors who were once deprived of winning the award due to language barriers and cultural differences in filmmaking.
In the coming years, Arcilla hopes to see more Filipinos on the list of Volpi Cup holders. “Like I always say, ‘acting and expressing do not have boundaries, we all cry, we all aspire,’ [so], I do not really think we’re different