The year ahead
‘Supreme’ predicts the people, trends, and projects that will define pop culture in 2017.
PEOPLE Joshua Garcia
The 2016 Metro Manila Film Fest entry Vince and Kath and James was a pleasant surprise to many who came in expecting a pretty standard formulaic romantic comedy. The film was oddly refreshing in a sea of romcoms all trying to out-cool one another; it didn’t put on any airs, it wasn’t afraid to be a little jeje, a lot silly, and mostly honest.
But one of the most delightful surprises came in the form of Joshua Garcia, whose portrayal of the title role Vince was all the parts it needed to be: little boy in a school playground pulling his crush’s pigtails, not-quite-a-jock but just-cool-enough guy you wouldn’t mind giving your mobile number to, and a heartbroken young man underneath a happy-go-lucky façade. Garcia was easily the heart of the film, and he handled his role with a grace and depth that not many actors, regardless of age, possess.
He’s also being touted as “the next John Lloyd.” But behind Joshua’s pretty boy exterior is something deeper. The 19-year-old was known to be the “troubled kid” of his batch inside the Pinoy Big Brother: All In house. By now it’s obvious that he has channeled that sense of turmoil inside into his acting.
“He is a very hardworking actor,” Theodore Boborol, director of Vince and Kath and James, says of Garica. “He comes to the set prepared. He asks questions when he wants to know more about the emotional obligation of the character or the scene’s intention. He’s a sensitive actor; he feels. He can actually be very serious at times, to the point that I have to tell him to loosen up. I would tell him, ‘I just want you to be young. This is not a melodrama, we’re not doing this to win any awards. What I want is for you to be truthful and sincere.’ He’d listen, and he would deliver.”
His first major role came in the 2015 afternoon series Nasaan Ka Noong Kailangan Kita, following up with supporting roles in films like You’re Still The One and Barcelona: A Love Untold. Garcia enters 2017 with Bloody Crayons, a horror film that reunites him with Vince and Kath and James co-stars Julia Barretto and Ronnie Alonte. The seeming cherry on top of a blossoming career is Garcia being likened to one of the industry’s most complex and beloved actors: John Lloyd Cruz. Boborol, however, is of a different opinion. “To be quite honest, I always tell him that I don’t want him to be the next John Lloyd. I want him to make his own mark on the industry as Joshua Garcia.”
And having had a taste of what Garcia has to offer, we’re likely to agree, and we’re impossibly eager to see the trajectory of this star’s rise to the top.