Photo by Migi C. Soriano

“You can ask me anything,” says Carla.

She takes a bite of chocolate cake. The enticement is equal parts routine nicety and veiled challenge from the veteran actress of eighteen years. With that phrase, she shrugs off the gazes she draws in this coffee shop and, with a flick of her fork, redirects their weight at me.

After living in the public eye for almost two decades, one wonders if there is anything else left to know about Carla Peralejo-Bonifacio, more commonly known as Rica Peralejo. “If they see you on TV, feeling nila anak ka nila, or feeling nila kapatid ka nila,” Carla laughs, explaining the familial bonds and access that the teleserye culture seems to forge between stars and their audiences.

From her Ang TV days in the ‘90s—“This was the Glee of our time!” she says fondly, for my reference—to her recent stint on the morning show Umagang Kay Ganda, and countless television and movie appearances in between, one can think that the media machine has resurrected every skeleton in her closet and dragged them, kicking and screaming, out into the open.

Under scrutiny

Perhaps she never caught as much attention as she did in the early 2000s when she took on a string of risqué roles and rose to fame as a sex icon. Baring it all for the camera was a predatory rite of passage for young actresses then racing to the higher corridors of stardom.

“People advised me that I’ll fall out of the race if I don’t [take the roles],” she says. ”It proved to be good for my career but at the same time, I was thinking, ‘How can I demand privacy when I’m showing [my audience] what they’re not supposed to see?’”

It’s the closest we get to talking about those times, and later on in our conversation, she makes no distinctions between those times and the other ills in her career. But through the negative experiences, Carla emerged a stronger woman, armed with street smarts and a silent resilience that belies her slight frame and kind face.

Among those ills is dealing with a gossiping public that thinks it’s got her all figured out. “You can tell from people’s faces if they know me from TV, and,” she says, “when they’re already judging me by the way I talk or look.”

Lamenting these untoward prejudgments against her, she says, “[It’s like I want to tell these people], ‘Uy, teka lang, you may watch me every day, but I don’t… tell you about my whole life, ‘di ba? You’re not my real friend.’”

It’s a subtext to our conversation that calls us to ponder how we see show business. It’s an industry of performance: actors constantly change color and skin. Even with the hawkish 24-hour news cycle, all tabloid tidbits and showbiz blogs can provide are angles and refractions—you simply can’t capture all of an individual’s complexities and render it into an image you can call complete.

Hitting the books

Carla goes through the humdrum of life in the Ateneo. Like the rest of us, she eats at the cafeteria, swears by the powers of caffeine (“This is my lifeline!” she says, clutching her steel vacuum flask) and has had her share of crazy dashes—at one point coming straight from morning tapings—for 7:30 AM classes she can barely stay conscious in.

The campus has provided her a quantum of reprieve from judging eyes. For some reason, it’s beyond Ateneans’ musterable courage—or beneath their curiosities, if you prefer—to recognize celebrities like Carla on campus.

While star-struck fans outside the school would relish the chance to approach their idols, Ateneans are content with shuffling along and shifting their attention to other things in their periphery. Which is great—Carla prefers to stay out of the spotlight for now. She’d rather concentrate on reading up for her Literature degree in the New Rizal Library, which she describes on Twitter as one of her favorite places in the world.

Carla shifted from Creative Writing to English Literature, seeing herself more as a scholar than as a writer of texts. Reading is her first love, she says, and traces her literary beginnings to her childhood, when she browsed copies of Archie Comics, Lewis Caroll’s Alice in Wonderland and the adventures of Nancy Drew. With a blush, Carla includes the Sweet Valley High series in the list.

She also used to nurse her inner geek with thick sets of science volumes that her mother would buy. “’Yung mga ‘yon dati uso pa, ngayon wala na. iPad na eh,” she adds with slight disapproval and a tinge of wistfulness.

We spend a couple of minutes discussing Malcolm Gladwell and his books, agreeing on the brilliance of The Tipping Point and Outliers (“Though they’re both of different flavors to me,” Carla points out while pouring herself another cup of coffee) but not really feeling all that convinced by Blink.

Finding new life

If there’s one book that Carla lives by, though, it’s the Bible. She reads it daily and regularly attends the services at Victory Christian Fellowship. “I used to find it really corny,” she says sheepishly. “I mean, how can you be happy without drinking? How can you do Bible study without getting drunk first?”

Nonetheless she warmed up to it and underwent an inner conversion at a service conducted by—though unknown to her at the time—her future husband, Joe Bonifacio.

“The pastor said, ‘If you feel this is the time to surrender your life to Jesus, raise your hand.’ And for some reason, I just felt like it,” Carla says. She’s speaking to me now with calmness and clarity.

“I thought, ‘This isn’t so bad at all.’ I raised my hand. People prayed for me and were really happy for me. And then I found out a few years after that the pastor who [administered] that service was my husband!”

How one goes from being a sexy star to the wife of a pastor? “I don’t know!”— that’s all Carla can say, failing to choke back a wave of laughter. She says that the best thing about her man is that he grew up without watching TV and caught only snippets of Ang TV straining from his neighbors’ television set. Back then, this was the most he knew about her career.

The pair met some time after that service through their mutual friends at church. “When I talked to him the first few times,” she relates, “naisip ko, ‘Hindi niya talaga ako kilala! Okay, ha!’”

“My personality comes out [when I’m with him] because I’m no longer defensive,” Carla says. “You learn how to build walls when people are being too privy with you. But when someone is genuinely interested in who you are and not in the person they see on TV, the walls start to go down.”

Taking her time

At the moment, Carla finds herself in a very happy place. Never did she think that at 30 years old, she’d be back in school doing her thesis and working her way towards graduation (just months away, mind you), while married to a pious man and planning to have children by next year.

“Having kids is my priority now. If work can fit in that scheme for me then I’ll still work [in showbiz],” Carla says. “I’m older now, and more mature, and I know how to handle it. Work is not the lord of my life.”

She finishes her cake and I drive her back to school in my pickup. She talks about her own driver and how amazing it is that he can weave a huge van through the tangles of Metro Manila traffic.

“He’s really good. It must’ve taken him 10,000 hours,” she chuckles, paraphrasing Gladwell.