The director of the upcoming local rom-com Everything About My Wife is here to remind you that there’s much more to Filipino love stories.
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There’s nothing like a good love story to get Filipinos to the cinema. Just look at the highest-grossing Filipino movies in history, and you’ll find that most involve love in their plot in one way or another. But while Filipinos love love, there’s also a point to be made that there’s more than one way to showcase love in the media. Love, after all, is multifaceted, and there’s room for more than the typical boy-meets-girl stories to be told. It’s this dynamic form of love that takes center stage in the upcoming local rom-com, Everything About My Wife.
A remake of the Argentinian film A Boyfriend for My Wife, this take follows married couple Dom (Dennis Trillo) and Imo (Jennylyn Mercado). At first, it seems like they have a perfect marriage, but cracks soon surface with increasingly frequent fights and disagreements. It leads to a rift between the two by the time they reach their seventh anniversary and causes Dom to rethink things. Making things more complicated is when Miguel (Sam Milby) enters the picture and a connection between him and Imo forms. Soon, the trio find themselves in a bit of a love triangle as Dom and Imo try to find it in themselves to relight the spark.
Coming at the end of love month, Everything About My Wife is the latest hugot-filled local offering for Filipino audiences and marks the first project between Dennis Trillo and Jennylyn Mercado as a married couple. But more than that, the movie looks to showcase a moving story of love after the fairytale wedding, one director Real Florido is more than ready to tell.
FROM DIREK REAL, WITH LOVE
Everything About My Wife’s journey to the big screen dates back to 2022, when Direk Real was busy laying down the building blocks of the movie we know today. “I feel like this is something that will resonate to a lot of Filipino moviegoers,” he tells NYLON Manila in an interview. “The story of a couple who have a seemingly perfect relationship, and then after a while, when they live with each other, they will get to know how they change and how all these expectations are foiled in reality. So I think it’s a funny yet truthful scenario.”
As for the film’s lead actress, Jennylyn Mercado wasn’t just an option, she was the number one choice for the director. “That time, I think Jen was on hiatus kasi she had given birth to Dylan. I chatted her and I told her ‘Jen watch this. This is my new project and I want you to be the lead actress. I hope you can find time to see it.’ So Jen watched it and then she looked at me and said, ‘Oh my God, it’s so beautiful. Wait for me.’ So we waited.”
Dennis Trillo soon found himself cast in the lead male role, and it wasn’t just because he and Jennyln Mercado are married IRL. “I have so much admiration for the two of them and I really think this is something new for Dennis,” says Direk Real. “You know the caliber of Dennis but this is something that I think is perfect for him, something different.”
As expected when you get two talented actors, who happen to be married to each other, to play a married couple, you’ll get natural chemistry on set. As Direk Real recalls, there wasn’t a need to do heavy chemistry tests with the two given how much of a pro they are. “The two of them are really mature actors so you don’t really have to think so much of the process and how you’re going to stage and floor them,” he gushes. “It’s like very instantaneous for them to just be in the character because they’re a married couple. And I think there’s so much love in real life that I think it transcends.”
While screen tests and chemistry workshops are often employed for two actors to find their kilig spot, that wasn’t needed as much here and it proved to be really handy. Though, that didn’t mean there was no preparation involved. Sometimes, when we watch A-list actors on the screen, we tend to still see them as celebrities and not the roles they are portraying. As major stars, Dennis Trillo and Jennylyn Mercado inspire a certain image in people’s minds, but don’t expect that in this movie.
From script readings to a workshop, the cast and crew came ready to give a good movie, not just a rom-com featuring two famous actors. “When people see the movie, it’s not really Dennis and Jen that they will see, but Dom and Imo. So there’s a lot of prep that we need to do before going on the shoot. So the actors are really prepared and very confident when they step on the set. I don’t think people will just look at them as Dennis and Jenny because there’s a story and the actors know it.”
Speaking of famous actors, the wattage here is further increased by Sam Milby playing the second male lead role. That’s a lot of star power, but Direk Real’s mind was less on the pressure of working with big names and more on building that good relationship between the cast and crew. “I think it’s the pressure of really creating a good working environment because the actors are very experienced and it’s also about building trust.” As the captain of the ship, Direk Real prioritized building the connection between talent and crew to foster a sense of trust that delivers the best movie possible.
WE LOVE LOVE
On the surface, Everything About My Wife looks like another Filipino rom-com that touches upon infidelity. But for Direk Real, this movie is more than just a couple of stereotypes and tropes. Turning the story beyond a girl-cheats-on-guy narrative required turning the attention toward the guy in the relationship and rooting the experience on his personal issues.
“Not being able to communicate how they feel about the relationship or how they feel about the changes that they experience while they grow together or while they stay together in a relationship. So the thought process that we have here is to get as many relatable experiences for Filipinos. And I think a lot of the story is really universal.”
In a country where divorce is still (sadly) illegal and the proof usually falls on the woman, Everything About My Wife makes the conscious effort to tell a relatable tale of what needs to be done on the guy’s end for a relationship to work.
“For Filipinos naman kasi, parang most men do not want to talk,” he candidly states. “They have a lot of things going on in their mind. So what if you’re already fed up with your partner, with your wife, and you just want to give her up? What will you do? When in fact, the deeper layer of that is something more intricate, something more complex because it’s springing out of a lot of things in the relationship and not being able to really identify the pain points that you have and not being able to communicate well.”
For Direk Real, whose past films have also dealt with the intricacies of marriage, Everything About My Wife’s take on marital relationships is both funny and serious and contextualizes itself in Filipino culture. “My thought process always goes back to our culture, the way we give so much importance to the sanctity of marriage, and it’s actually visible in some of the projects that I did.”
So, with a story that puts people’s communication skills (or lack thereof) at the center, is that a message Filipino audiences are ready to hear? “I think yeah,” he answers in the affirmative. “When you tell a story, it has to be something new, something that Filipinos would be able to reflect on about the way they live their lives. It’s like comfort food for a lot of us because it makes us feel, it makes us have this vicarious experience, something that all these pent-up emotions or issues that we don’t wanna say because life is really hard in the country. So we just want to have a release.”
Since time immemorial, cinema has served as an avenue for people to feel something and get a kind of release that other mediums can’t offer them. In a nation that has many ways to describe love, it’s no wonder romance has been a staple of Philippine entertainment for decades. But as time progresses, so too do we see how romance told through the Filipino context evolves, both in terms of topics and sophistication. The pillars of a good rom-com will always be there (because who doesn’t love a good rom-com, right?), but so too do we see love on the big screen blossom into other forms that show love as complex where seeing things in black and white aren’t always the norm and where nuanced takes on universal themes can and do exist.
PHILIPPINE CINEMA ON TOP
Everything About My Wife is arriving at an interesting time for Philippine cinema. On one hand, for two years straight, a Filipino movie has surpassed one billion pesos at the box office. But on the other hand, the wealth isn’t equally spread to other local movies, with box office receipts still falling behind international films. It’s a development that’s not lost on Direk Real, but he hopes that the movie, one of the first big local films of 2025, offers Filipinos a reason to head to the cinemas.
“I always look out how to serve something that will inspire Filipinos, will give them a sense of experience that they’re not able to have in their daily lives,” he says, noting that blockbusters from Marvel and Disney do well locally so Filipinos still go to the cinemas in a post-pandemic world. “This movie is something that has so much reason because it will make them feel, it will make them reflect on the things that they’ve been ruminating about. It will give them the kind of emotions that they want to squeeze out from their hearts and the project is not your usual trope.”
Despite the naysayers out there, Filipino movies are worth a trip to the cinema. The local industry’s struggles are no secret, but Direk Real sees a shift in mindset as needed to see that Philippine cinema is not one to be scoffed at. “Sometimes, we have so much high standards for each other and on the things that we do and we look at stuff from other countries made by other people highly when in fact, when you look down on our own, we’re actually contributing to the decline of our culture, of our industry. So if we don’t support local projects, it is all of us who are going to suffer.”
Yes, there’s a lot that goes into loving your own, such as support and funding from the government and other institutions and lowering the barrier of entry (mainly with prices), but it also wouldn’t hurt to go beyond stereotypical ideas we have of the local creative industry. How do you expect quality from our local filmmakers, after all, if you don’t support their quality films? “I think it’s more than the movie. It’s a culture because we think that if we support local, it makes us cheap, and if we support something from outside the country, it makes us superior. I think that has to change.”
And on a personal note, Direk Real is hoping that Everything About My Wife has enough reasons for Filipino viewers to take a trip to the cinema. “[Everything About My Wife] is something that we made sure that this is not your usual movie,” he confidently states. “You know, to be honest, instead of filming somewhere else, we filmed in Cebu because we want to feature how great the metropolis of Cebu is. Of course, Manila has always been the main setting of a lot of stories. We really want to feature our culture. We want to feature the beauty of the Philippines. And yeah, of course, the story is something that [the audience] will be able to relate to.”
Everything About My Wife plays in local cinemas this February 26
Photos courtesy of CreaZion Studios
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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