VR Relosa slept under an MRT station at 17. A decade later, the “Vivamax King” is doing Cinemalaya, theater, and an indie shot years before any of it.

The rains had been heavy for weeks. Shoots kept getting cancelled, plans kept falling through, and by the morning of September 4, actor VR Relosa says he’d talked himself into a bad headspace — self-doubt stacking on self-doubt, the kind of morning where nothing feels earned. Then a Facebook memory notification surfaced an old photo, taken on the same date ten years earlier. He describes it almost like an interruption, something reaching in to shake him awake. So he wrote out what he remembered and posted it, the way you’d hand someone else the thing that just steadied you.

What he posted was this: on September 4, 2016, he was seventeen, working ten-hour shifts as a waiter at a small restaurant in Taguig for ₱3,000 a month, sleeping some nights under an MRT (Metro Rail Transit) station and others at a McDonald’s, walking for two hours on days he didn’t have fare. He turned eighteen the next day, in line for a call center interview, telling the guard at the door he was still technically underage but would be legal by the time the interview ended.

Ten years later, almost to the hour, he’s done a total of 31 films and three theater projects. This year alone, he’s shot eleven films, appeared in two theater productions, and — for the first time in his life — has more work than he can keep track of.

Eighteen Years of No

His first audition happened twelve years before that waiter job — for StarStruck Kids, GMA Network’s reality-based talent search, when he was five years old. The batch also produced Bea Binene, Paul Salas, and Miguel Tanfelix. He didn’t get in, and he kept auditioning anyway, year after year, for nearly two decades.

Some of it was ordinary rejection; some of it was worse — managers who turned out to be running schemes, one of whom required him to enroll and pay for voice lessons as a precondition for joining a boy group, then had him personally recruit and promote at schools to fill out that group’s roster before it quietly dissolved. He camped out for the open casting call of Pinoy Big Brother at Araneta Coliseum in Quezon City, two days in line with no assigned number, which meant leaving even briefly cost him his spot entirely. He recalls managers of already-famous actors approaching him with the kind of attention that felt, in the moment, like a discovery, before steering him toward paid workshops or gym memberships that led nowhere.

“For eighteen years, even the smallest role — even a single second on camera, even just the back of my head — never happened for me,” he tells ElysPlanet.

Eventually, he gave up. He told himself he’d aged out, that it was time to accept a stable job and let the dream go.

The Year Everything Ran Out

That decision landed around the same stretch the September 4 post describes. Relosa worked his way from the waiter job into a call center position — the Business Process Outsourcing, or BPO, industry that’s absorbed much of Metro Manila’s entry-level workforce — right at eighteen. In between, there was a period with nowhere fixed to sleep, alternating between an elevated rail station exit and a nearby McDonald’s, depending on whether he had enough to justify an order.

“My bag was always hugged against me. It only had three pieces of clothing inside,” he tells ElysPlanet, describing how he’d sit upright against a wall rather than lie down. “There was really nothing anyone could steal from me.”

At his lowest point, ₱200 had to last roughly two weeks. He spent it entirely on putok, a dense, sugar-topped bread. “Even just half a piece, and you’re full,” he says.

The Boy Group Era, and the Mall Show Circuit

The mid-2010s boy-group wave — the era of One Direction, when Philippine talent agencies were chasing the same formula — gave him his next attempt. He cycled through three or four different groups that each collapsed before debuting: teenagers with conflicting priorities, managers who dissolved lineups mid-rehearsal.

When that didn’t work, he tried going solo, performing at malls across Luzon, sometimes three in a single day. He’s candid about the gap between the image and the reality. “Hindi po talaga ako kumakanta” — I don’t actually sing, he admits — pushing through anyway because the unwritten rule of the industry was that you had to look multi-talented to get noticed. He even held his own self-funded birthday concert at a small bar near Timog Avenue, bringing in real singers as guests since he knew his own voice wasn’t the draw, and deliberately inviting childhood friends with genuine talent who’d never been given an industry opening.

The Yes That Finally Came

By the pandemic, he’d stopped auditioning entirely. Then a friend nagged him into submitting for one more role, mostly to make the nagging stop. Three months of silence followed. He’d accepted it wasn’t happening. Then, on a Tuesday, a call: was he free that Friday?

He said yes immediately, without asking for a script, a genre, or a director’s name — just relief that, after eighteen years, something had finally landed. He didn’t read the full script until days before the shoot, and only then realized the project — Lagaslas, his first film for VMX, the Philippine streaming platform formerly known as Vivamax and known for its R-rated slate — was an adult film. He says it wasn’t a dealbreaker for him personally; years of quick backstage changes in community theater had already made him comfortable enough around bodies that the shift didn’t rattle him the way it might have.

Lagaslas was directed by Christopher Novabos and led directly into a run of films that made him one of VMX’s most recognizable new faces — enough that acclaimed writer-director Joey Reyes tagged him “Vivamax King.” Relosa says the title came organically, from people already inside Viva — directors, even the talent agent who signed him — rather than a company mandate, which is part of why he’s never personally claimed it, even while accepting it graciously in interviews. He’s said publicly before that he sees the label as more pressure than asset.

Expanding, Not Exiting

Ask him whether this year’s turn toward Cinemalaya, the Philippines’ flagship independent film festival, and toward theater signals a step away from VMX, and he’s specific about the distinction.

“It’s not really a deliberate exit — it’s more like expanding,” he tells ElysPlanet. “I want to experience different kinds of acting. I can do that.”

Early in his VMX run, he recalls his road manager turning down certain roles on his behalf, reasoning they didn’t fit his image as a “hunk.” He pushed back on that logic himself, arguing the image wouldn’t last forever and he needed to prove range while he still had the chance.

That’s the reasoning behind this year’s slate. In Hoy, Hoy, Ingat!, a Cinemalaya short finalist directed by Norvin De Los Santos, he plays Bhing, an older brother fighting to reclaim his family’s impounded jeepney. In Starfish, a Polytechnic University of the Philippines student short for Puregold’s CinePanalo Film Festival, a competition built around student filmmakers, he’s Boyet, a former macho dancer forced back to his home province after losing his job. He was one of twenty actors selected, out of a competitive field, for the Film Development Council of the Philippines’ Master Series acting workshop, overseen by three directors with sharply different working styles — Joey Reyes, the same director who tagged him “Vivamax King,” veteran filmmaker Laurice Guillen, on whom he had no prior read at all, and famed director Joel Lamangan. “Kailangan hindi ka matakot na mapahiya, matakot na maging tanga sa harap nila,” he says of the approach he settled on — you have to stop being afraid to embarrass yourself in front of people. “Doon ka lang talaga gagaling.” That’s really the only way you get better.

The theater debut carried its own fear. He can’t actually sing — the mall-show performances, he’s clear, were pure fan-service, not real vocal work — and told director Raffy Tejada as much before being cast as lead in a musical anyway. He spent more than two months of rehearsal without opening the script at all, drilling the same song hundreds of times because he knew that, not the lines, was his real weak point.

The One He’s Actually Nervous About

Of everything currently on his plate — a slate that still includes recent VMX titles like Palitan 2, Check-In, and Sex Trip, plus a still-unreleased second season of Cheat — the project weighing on him most isn’t any of those. It’s Golda, an independent film shot three years ago in Thailand, before any of his VMX work began, where he was the lead opposite veteran actors Soliman Cruz and Cedrick Juan. He describes it as his first trip outside the Philippines and, by his own account, his first real mainstream production — one that’s sat finished for years and is only now approaching release, which is exactly why it’s the one that still makes him nervous.

What He’d Tell the Kid Who Posted That

Asked what his seventeen-year-old self — the one sleeping under the MRT, budgeting bread by the piece — would make of this year, Relosa takes a moment before answering. He tallies it out loud instead: a Cinemalaya credit, eleven films, two theater productions, in twelve months. He connects it to a prayer from the year before, when all he’d asked for was to be able to start. He describes getting a callback for the Cinemalaya slot, being told the production had gone with someone else, and giving up hope entirely — only to learn weeks later that the short had gotten in after all.

“I don’t know if I deserve this,” he tells ElysPlanet. “But the years I spent waiting really paid off.”

His own Facebook post ended with a line worth keeping in the original: “Kaya wag nating susukuan ang mga pangarap natin” — so let’s not give up on our dreams. He turns twenty-eight on September 5.

Photos courtesy of VR Relosa.