Meet Betty La Bea

You can be sure Bea Alonzo’s seen the ugly side of showbiz — gave all those requisite rumors and gossip column items a once-over — and told herself, ‘Whatever. I can handle this.’ “My first years in showbiz, I thought this was the perfect world, kasi ‘pag napapanood mo sa movies, it’s glamorous and all,” she says, recalling the wide-eyed wonder she had for the local realm of stars and celluloid. “Pero hindi mo alam yung nangyayari behind it. Kahit may sakit ka, kahit na you’re mourning, kahit na you’re hurting, the show must go on. You have to have this reality check every time and expect the unexpected.”

Muddling her cherry-lipped, milky-skinned mug and assuming the role of aesthetically challenged Betty La Fea — plunging into the guise of a character who was the antithesis of the knockout actress fans have come to know Bea as — is certainly a challenge considering a lot of justice needs to be done to the lovable Colombian character who’s borne more than 16 other Bettys worldwide (from India to Italy to America’s Ugly Betty, played by America Ferrera) and that teen girls nationwide will be obsessing over.

But then the task is nothing new to Bea, who, at 15, first struck audiences with her portrayal of a 21-year-old lawyer; a character she intensively studied and revealed her extremely versatile acting aptitude through. Sure, she blazed into stardom through a succession of silver screen romances (the Bea-Lloydy love powerhouse, go figure) and surefire hit roles that endeared everyone from regular trike drivers to giggly colegialas. But getting there, however, took the sort of perchance encounter that mirrored that of Betty La Fea’s kindly-boss-follows-his-gut hiring as the regulation ‘nottie’ in an office that worships superficiality; Bea snagging her job as star through a fateful elevator ride that got a designer like Oscar Peralta to balk in admiration and send the ingénue off to molder of matinee marvels, Johnny Manahan.

Like Betty in her bitch-eat-bitch working atmosphere, Bea is an odd women out in an industry where Spanish mestiza looks will get you anywhere even without that oh-so-negligible aspect of talent. But despite her strawberries ‘n’ cream countenance and syrupy voice, Bea’s eyes evoke a vast landscape of emotions; a worldliness, even, considering her family’s past financial troubles, all the rumors, and those days she’d sit and wonder why she was in this fake, treacherous industry in the first place. As with Betty, though, you know she can turn all that adversity and ugliness into a thing of beauty. “Sa business na ‘to, kailangan may façade ka each time, like may mga tao na first time ka makita, you should smile for them at least, di ba? Isang kagandahan yan ng business na ‘to — na with just a wave, you could make the day of this person…you could touch their lives.”