Elijah Canlas, the Edjop star who refuses to stay the serious one

Elijah Canlas

Photo: Unknown / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	August 16, 2000 Manila, Philippines
Occupation	Actor
Awards	Gawad Urian · FAMAS · Asian Film Festival (Rome) Best Actor · Harlem International Film Festival Best Actor · EDDYS Best Actor · Pista ng Pelikulang Pilipino Special Jury Prize

Katski Flores did not want him for the older scenes. The director of Edjop thought Elijah Canlas was too young to play Edgar Jopson as a grown man, the Ateneo student leader who walked away from a comfortable family life, went underground and was killed by the military. Canlas had only been offered the teenage scenes, a handful of pages. He asked for the whole screenplay first, because, as he put it, he does not take a role he cannot read entirely. Then he sat for a prosthetics screen test. Flores was the last person on her team to be convinced, and what convinced her was a photograph: with the ageing make-up on, he looked, she said, eerily like Jopson’s mugshot.

That small act of insistence explains most of his career. Canlas says he picks a role by two tests, whether it challenges him and whether it carries some personal, social or political weight and Flores praised him for taking on a revolutionary without counting the fans he might lose. Yet the same year Edjop reached cinemas he also turned up as a schemer in Victor Villanueva’s Pride-month comedy Drags to Riches and as a son who finally pranks back the father who pranks him every birthday opposite John Arcilla in a Veronica Velasco comedy. The serious actor and the comic one are the same person, and he refuses to choose.

The family calls him Jelo. He is the second of three sons of Rommel and Lyn Canlas, and Elijah Luiz Madiclum Canlas came into the world in Manila on August 16, 2000, in a house where theatre was there before school was: his mother had been a ballerina and a stage actress in Bacolod, and all three boys, Jerom, Elijah and the youngest, JM, ended up acting. He went to grade school at Statefields School in Bacoor, Cavite, studied theatre arts at the Philippine High School for the Arts, finished senior high at MINT College and studies Philippine arts at the University of the Philippines Manila between shoots.

He was fourteen when he made his debut as one of the four young leads of Sundalong Kanin, a Cinemalaya entry directed by Janice O’Hara and was still too young for the after-parties when his short Contestant #4 played the QCinema festival. The audition that mattered went badly the first time: around his debut year he tried out for the lead of a project then called Son of God and was turned down, because the part was meant for a boy who looked like the mestizo son of a Spanish friar. Four years later he sat down with the director, Jun Robles Lana, because he was looking for a talent manager. Lana told him, without being asked, that he could play the lead in his next film.

That film was Kalel, 15, shot in black and white, about a fifteen-year-old who learns he is HIV positive, with Jaclyn Jose and Eddie Garcia around him. It premiered at Tallinn Black Nights and brought him a run of prizes for one performance: best actor at the Gawad Urian, the critics’ prize of the Manunuri ng Pelikulang Pilipino, at the FAMAS Awards, at the Asian Film Festival in Rome and at the Harlem International Film Festival. CNN Philippines named him its actor of the year. He said he hoped the prizes would help keep people talking about HIV.

The pandemic gave him a second, very different audience. In Gameboys, a boys’ love series made by Lana’s company The IdeaFirst Company and released on YouTube during the lockdown, he played Cairo Lazaro, an up-and-coming game streamer who finds love online during the lockdown, opposite Kokoy de Santos. Lana then cast him opposite Romnick Sarmenta in About Us But Not About Us, a chamber drama that won best film at Tallinn, and the Cinemalaya drama Blue Room brought him the best actor prize at the EDDYS, the awards of the Philippine entertainment editors.

The tidy version of his story, the festival prodigy who kept his distance from the mainstream, does not survive a look at the credits. Since Senior High, where he played Archie Aguerro and then carried the character into High Street, he has been a primetime face on ABS-CBN: FPJ’s Batang Quiapo, Incognito, a co-hosting chair on the variety show ASAP and the music video for Cup of Joe’s “Multo”. He took supporting parts in two Metro Manila Film Festival entries, Pepe Diokno’s GomBurZa, as Paciano Mercado, and Dan Villegas’s Uninvited. That is how a Filipino actor stays employed, not a betrayal of Kalel, 15. The risk lies elsewhere. His best work is built on withholding, a face that keeps something back, and this year’s broad comedies, Drags to Riches and HB2Me, ask for the opposite. Whether that stillness survives a prank film is the fairer question about his range.

He has also been working outside the frame. In February he released South II, a ten-track rap debut on Island Records Philippines that follows singles such as “Kilala Kita”. He returned to the stage this October as Lancelot in a run of About Us But Not About Us at the Power Mac Center Spotlight Blackbox Theater in Makati, and the Manunuri named him a best actor nominee again at the 49th Gawad Urian, for Ryan Machado’s Rumaragasa, a mystery built around a plane crash. Edjop itself opened nationwide on September 16 through Warner Bros., after more than five years in the making, with Jodi Sta. Maria as Jopson’s grown daughter and Kakie Pangilinan, in her first film, as his young wife.

His younger brother JM, also an actor, died in August 2023 at seventeen. In September he confirmed the end of his relationship with the actress Miles Ocampo, after nearly five years together with one break in between, describing the split as mutual and amicable and asking people to let them heal.

The work queued up next is unusually varied. He is in principal photography on One For The Road, a road movie directed by Kip Oebanda for Regal Entertainment and Singapore’s Mocha Chai Laboratories, playing one of four high-school best friends, now in their mid-twenties, whom a tragedy forces back together; it is slated for the second quarter of 2027. He leads Jaguar, Dean Colin Marcial’s Manila crime thriller about a night-shift security guard who becomes the only witness to a murder, and he has finished a film with Brillante Mendoza that called for a visible physical transformation, plus an Erwin Blanco film billed as the first Filipino production shot in Finland. After a year spent playing a martyr and a prankster, the next set of roles will show which of the two he trusts more.