Love, Actually: Anne Curtis And Jericho Rosales On Turning Heartbreak Into Art

On paper, The Loved One can be filed under romantic drama, a genre that operates as if the human heart is a reasonably efficient machine. Two people meet, fall in love, then something gets in the way. There is crying (usually in good lighting) then someone either runs after someone at an airport, followed by a big kissing scene, and then cue end credits.

Yet in reality, The Loved One is messier, sharper and far more human. Directed by Irene Villamor, the film follows Ellie and Eric across a relationship that stretches over a decade, a timeline long enough for love to shed its photogenic veneer and become more nuanced. This is not a romance built around a singular obstacle or convenient misunderstanding. Instead, it looks at what happens when two people love, hurt and outgrow each other, but cannot be cleanly extracted from each other’s lives. Very annoying behaviour from the heart, really, but haven’t we all been there at one point in our lives?

At the centre of it are Anne Curtis and Jericho Rosales, two of the Philippines’ most recognisable stars, reunited on screen after more than a decade. Their pairing already carries its own charge for homegrown audiences, but The Loved One does not coast on nostalgia. It asks for something trickier from both of them: abrasion, grit, tenderness without polish. Curtis brings to Ellie a brightness that leaps off the screen, then lets it dim in ways that feel almost too familiar. Rosales, known affectionately to many as Echo, gives Eric a masculine fragility that mainstream romance rarely allows to sit so openly.

The result has been unexpectedly participatory. Audiences did not simply watch the film and move on; instead, they debated it, took sides, went for dinner to dissect the characters, then watched it again to check whether they had judged the wrong person too quickly. Clearly, the movie did its job well.

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Messy Feels

Curtis laughs when she talks about the response. “People were creating essays,” she says, referring to the TikTok reactions she has saved in a folder. “Some people had realisations. Some people broke up after watching the film. That is crazy.”

There is a natural ease to the way Curtis gushes about the film’s reactions. She speaks quickly, warmly, and there is a chirpiness to her that does not diminish the thought behind her answers. She understands Ellie, but she is also willing to laugh at the madness Ellie has unleashed in group chats, TikTok comments and, apparently, actual relationships.

For Curtis, the role arrived at a precise moment. She had not shot a film since 2019, having taken time away after becoming a mother. “I found myself really missing the act of acting itself,” she recounts. She reached out to Villamor with a specific appetite. “I told her I was interested in looking for a more mature love story. Something that tackles the rawness of a relationship.”

Villamor had a script ready, with one catch: there was already a leading man attached who turned out to be Rosales. Curtis read the script and found herself drawn immediately to Ellie.

“I fell in love with Ellie,” she recounts. “I feel she is such a representation of women now. She is career-driven and looking for a bigger purpose in life, but she does not lose that will to love. Telling her story felt like something the audience was ready for.”

Ellie is not the easiest woman to package, which is precisely why she works. She is ambitious without being cold, loving without being submissive, confused at times but never mistaken for being weak. She wants a life that belongs to her, which sounds reasonable until you remember how often women in love stories are rewarded for shrinking their wants. Curtis understood that tension immediately. “I have always been someone who stood firm with what my own beliefs are,” she reflects on a personal level. “Especially for someone that I love, I will adjust, because in a relationship it is give and take. But I will never lose what my true core is.”

That line feels telling coming from Curtis, who has spent almost her entire life in the public eye. She is approaching her 29th year in the industry, a fact that might make another performer sound like an institution. She still speaks about work with a sense of appetite. There is no grand declaration about reinvention or a new era that stars are so prone to employing.

She simply sounds ready, mentioning that “I’m so sure there’s something out there I haven’t done yet. Instead of being scared about it, I’m excited to welcome more scripts into my lap.” The industry may have watched her grow up, become a mother, become a fashion figure, become one of the Philippines’ most visible stars, but Curtis’ relationship with the work still has room for curiosity, which may be the real flex here.

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Understanding Ellie

Does she find Ellie frustrating? “Of course,” Curtis answers without missing a beat. “I was like, ‘you should have left him when he cheated’.” It is a funny answer because it is also the obvious one, as anyone might consider infidelity in any form a simple case of upping and going.

Thankfully, the film has no interest in being that cut and dried. “She stayed because she loved him,” Curtis explains. “That happens in real life. There are relationships where partners have cheated, but they choose to stay and work through things.”

The film is clever about how it traces the cost of that staying. Curtis points out that Ellie begins the story full of life, then becomes visibly more muted as the relationship wears on her. That shift was intentional, as were the tiny visual changes in repeated scenes, where the same moment is remembered differently depending on whose point of view is being shown. “In a relationship, when something happens, there are always two POVs,” she says. “Maybe he remembered it this way but maybe in my memory, this is how it happened.” Even the same dress might appear in a different design, Curtis explains, a subliminal and deliberate message that our minds can trick us with undetectable confidence.

Rosales had his own route into the material. He admits he had declined the script more than once because he did not want to do a love story. Then he met Villamor, revisited the script and felt something shift. “I read the story, and I immediately felt the connection,” he says.

“It felt like she had written a story based on a lot of moments in my life.” His first read on Eric was specific. “I see this guy. Ten years ago, I was this guy for a period of time,” Rosales says with unflinching honesty. “He is very idealistic. He has an idea of what a family should look like, what a guy should do. In so many ways, this reflects who I was in the past. Eric is a textbook, traditional romantic guy, but he is actually very fragile in a way.”

Rosales is disarmingly charming, but what is more interesting is the way he handles a thought. He does not rush to decorate an answer. He pauses, thinks, then offers it as though he has turned it around a few times before placing it on the table.

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The Man Behind Eric

It makes the conversation feel unusually open, especially when he talks about the parts of himself that found their way into Eric. In the character, Rosales saw a reflection of how modern masculinity is shaped by cultural and societal expectation, by the comfort of being thought of as a good catch, and by the confidence that comes from believing he knows how life should be arranged. He worked on a backstory in which Eric had taken on the role of provider within his family, a history that informed the way Eric carries himself. “His value comes from being the provider, being this head of the family,” he says.

Still, Rosales was more interested in what sits beneath that polish. For him, this became a chance for Rosales to examine the pressure placed on women to fit into a pre-approved shape. “The intention for me was to provoke people to think: Why can’t women just be? Why can’t people just be?” he asks. “Anne’s character, Ellie, was a representation of women who just wanted to be themselves.” Eric, in that reading, becomes something larger than one flawed man. “Eric is the representation of society,” Rosales opines. “It is my way of saying we have much to learn.”

There is something honest about how plainly he says this. When asked whether it was frightening to confront past versions of himself through Eric, he says no. “It was ego that I had already dealt with,” he explains. “There were some hard things to swallow personally, but a lot of that also stems from a place of personal ego. The one thing I value so much is my freedom, and I wanted to be free from my ideals and my ego.”

That word, freedom, comes up often with Rosales because it feels like something he has had to earn privately. His understanding of Eric is rooted in the idea that a man can look good on paper and still be emotionally underdeveloped. Asked whether men are taught to process lost love in a healthy way, Rosales answers quickly.

“Definitely not,” he says, pointing out that men tend to bury it, joke about it, and move on. “My father never taught me how to, and boys keep their feelings inside. They only talk about their feelings when it is already really affecting them.”

His father comes up again later, when he talks about bravery. Growing up with his father away, Rosales remembers being a boy who needed to prove he could take a hit. Rosales remembers that as a young kid, he brought out a pair of boxing gloves and asked an older male friend to fight him as a test of strength and courage. The image is as comical as it is revealing. “It has always been a journey of showing people that I can do this, like ‘I got this’,” Rosales says. Now, bravery has taken on a different form. “I am at a stage of my life where I show a different colour. For me, vulnerability, acceptance, and loving yourself in an unorthodox way is actually essential.”

In that sense, The Loved One becomes more than another sappy romance. It is also an exploration of masculinity that is charming, capable and still learning how to tell the truth about itself. The film allows Eric to listen, and Rosales recalls the final stretch of the film, from the café to the apartment, as the emotional key. “They are breaking up, but they are not breaking up to sever the connection,” he points out. “The whole movie is about love taking on a different shape.”

Curtis felt that same emotional shape most clearly in the breakup scene. “It felt so lived-in for us,” she says. “The preparation was so easy. Irene would cue us, and Jericho and I were ready to plunge in.” She also remembers the major fight scene, where instead of turning it into a grand dramatic eruption, they played it closer to real life. “When you think of dramatic films, people think you ought to react in an overactive manner,” she shares. “For us, we decided to do it in a way that is very human because in real life, that is how you fight. You’re not thinking about giant gestures of anger.”

Thankfully, both co-stars have an in-built trust between them from working together, and that rapport helped. Both Curtis and Rosales describe themselves as energetic, funny people off-camera, then fully switched on once the scene begins.

“The moment we are on set, it is like a 180-degree switch,” Curtis says. “We know what we have to do.” Rosales puts it this way: “Anne is one of the most fearless artists out there. She is very open.” Their discussions on set, he adds, were “filled with excitement”, because both knew what each scene required from them to come alive.

What the film called for was maturity, which came easily only because both actors have had time to live in their own real relationships. Curtis admits she no longer believes in love at first sight. “Honestly, the reality of that is attraction at first sight,” she says with a laugh. “Love is continuous work. When you are building a life together, it is constantly a work in progress. You choose to love this person.”

Rosales arrives at a similar place through a different vocabulary. Love, for him now, involves listening, supporting the other person’s dreams and loving himself enough to avoid dependence. “I poured years into understanding myself and loving myself so I can stand in my own relationship without being a burden and dependent on someone else,” he says. “The way I understand love is that it’s not tied up or boxed in one thing, and it shouldn’t be.”

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When Stories Travel

That refusal to box things in extends to the film’s place within Asian cinema. The Loved One has travelled beyond the Philippines, finding audiences across the region and through streaming. For Curtis, that reach feels opportune. “It is about time,” she notes. “Our neighbouring Asian film industries have arrived at their moment, and I remain so hopeful that the Philippines will get our moment to shine on a global scale.”

Streaming platforms have helped, but she is clear that the work must lead. “I hope they see that there is so much talent in the Philippines in terms of directors, writers, actors and the people who make these shows and films come alive.”

She also recognises why The Loved One felt daring in its local context. According to Curtis, the script had been around for some time before she and Rosales came on board, but some production companies found the issues too much: infidelity, living together before marriage, complicated commitment, characters without simple redemption. “It goes against our conservativeness as Asians,” she says. “But I feel like it is time to show that this is real life. We can also do reality, and we can do complex stories.”

That, perhaps, is the more useful way to think about contemporary Filipino cinema beyond the old tropes of heavy-handed melodrama. There is feeling, yes, but feeling alone is not the point. In The Loved One, emotion becomes a way to look at social expectation, gender, faithfulness, ambition and the gap between how a relationship is remembered by two people who lived through it together. It may be read culturally Filipino at certain points, but the emotional context travels easily because the push and pull between love and selfhood will not feel distant, nor will the fear of losing time or the ache of realising that love can survive even after a relationship has changed beyond recognition. Love, as the saying goes, is a universal language.

Rosales is wary of turning global attention into the main goal. His hope for Philippine cinema is more inward-facing, yet no less compelling. “My hopes are very localised,” he adds. “We make movies because we want to share stories from small towns, stories from our home.” For him, the larger question is identity.

“I pray that our filmmakers and writers know themselves and know our culture, dig deeper and reflect what it is really like. A film that is true to itself will travel,” he reflects. It is a useful corrective to the way Asian cinema is often embraced internationally, as if only certain exports are approved for a worldwide audience: action, spectacle, historical sweep, and repeat. The Loved One suggests another route: its scale is emotional, the drama comes from a place of realism, and instead of stirring speeches, it is filled with intimate conversations people usually avoid until the relationship is past its due. Nobody is saving the world here. They are trying, with varying degrees of success, not to wreck each other. On some days, for most of us ordinary people, is that not a feat in itself?

Away from The Loved One, both actors are still looking ahead. Curtis is working on BuyBust: The Undesirables, a Netflix series spun off from her hit 2018 film, and has other films in the pipeline. After the time she took away from film, there is a sense that the pause clarified her appetite. Rosales, as he puts it, still has a child in him that wants to play through action, adventure, projects that are fun and silly and alive. “I just want to bring back and protect the joy that I have as a person and actor,” he says.

Villamor gave him a piece of direction that stayed with him: make mistakes. For an actor who has spent years trying to fix, arrange and carry things, the permission mattered. “You’ve been trying to make things perfect for a very long time,” he recalls her telling him. “Time for you to make a mistake.” It is a beautiful instruction for an actor, and maybe an even better one for a person.

At the end of our conversations, both actors return to the idea of worth, only from different angles. Curtis hopes that, years from now, audiences remember Ellie as a woman who valued herself. “In spite of loving that person, she knew she had to value her worth,” she says. Rosales looks at Eric with unexpected tenderness. “I just want to give him a hug,” he says. “[He’s done a] good job in listening, in actually taking that step, sitting at a table, spending an hour with your past, having a coffee, and talking.”

Could this be a big part of why The Loved One lands? Perhaps. Here’s a movie that does not turn heartbreak into a moral lesson, nor does it ask you to pick a villain for convenience. It offers something more complex: two people trying to understand what love becomes when it cannot remain what it was. That might sound painful, and often it is, but there is hope in the fact that both Ellie and Eric arrive somewhere more honest by the end. They may not get the easy ending, but they get clarity, and for grown-ups, that is in itself a form of closure.

Rosales says he wants people to see that bravery “isn’t one colour.” At this stage of his life, bravery looks like vulnerability, acceptance and loving oneself in an unorthodox way. Curtis, with Ellie, hopes that she can give that bravery a different face: here is a woman who can love deeply and still choose herself.

Between them, The Loved One now feels like a portrait about love after romance has shed its gestures of swooning infatuation and hazy giddiness. It hurts, lingers, and somehow, it leaves the door open for growth and grace. That, in itself, plays to the beauty of this very human emotion: even after it changes shape, love might still have something generous to teach us.

Editor-in-chief: Kenneth Goh
Photographer: BJ Pascual
Stylist: Gracia Phang
Cover looks: Tiffany & Co., Gucci
Makeup for Anne: Raymond Santiago
Hair for Anne: Robbie Piñera
Grooming for Jericho: EJ Caro
Producer: Roxanne Matias
Set design: Princess Barretto
Production assistant: Raki Acosta
Styling assistant: Shin Miyamoto