Actor Andrew Ramsay invests 200 percent in his job, so to speak. To prepare for an award-winning performance, he lost 40 pounds, lived in a dingy boxing gym and exchanged blows with underdog boxers.

The hard work and immersion paid off. He won Best Actor for Ginhawa at the 60th Asia-Pacific Film Festival. Ginhawa is an indie film about a boxer who sought the sport as a way out of poverty.

Andrew is one of the few Filipino actors with classical training. The youngest of five children, Derek Andrew III — DA to family — would tag along with his brother, Derek Arthur Ramsay Jr., to watch his kuya's teleserye tapings. He would be fascinated by the buzz on the set and the interaction between the director and actors.

"I read a lot of stuff about actors. They said that with a strong theater background, they easily transitioned to film," he says. Following his creative urges, Andrew took up acting workshops at the Philippine Educational Theater Association where he learned acting basics, breathing exercises, vocal warm-ups and script analysis.

The discipline was further reinforced when he took up Shakespeare and musical theater for a year at the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts in the United Kingdom.

From 2015 to 2020, he worked for a Master of Fine Arts in Acting for Film at the New York Film Academy in Los Angeles. Andrew appeared in as many school productions and non-profit theater groups to discover his range from classics by Shakespeare to contemporary plays by David Mamet.

In 2018, he got a break by being cast as Malcolm in Macbeth, produced by the Shakespeare Center. "I got paid doing something that I loved," he shares.

Back home

When the world went on a shutdown in 2020, Andrew was compelled to come home. To be productive, he and friends put up a video production company, Cutaway Productions, which has since been working with advertising agencies and provides video marketing content for businesses.

Still, Cutaway Productions has its passion projects of short films and a feature film, The Dust in Your Place, which was shown at the Cinemalaya Philippine Independent Film Festival in 2020. They collaborated with playwright Joaquin Emilio Antonio who transposed his play into film script. The movie was about two couples, copywriters in an ad agency, who had previous relationships with their partners, and how they managed to finish their jobs while coming to terms with their past.

Anxiety

In the early part of the pandemic, anxiety drove Andrew into emotional eating. "I looked like a couch potato at 175 lbs," he recalls. When restrictions eased, Filipino-Canadian director Christian Paolo Lat broke in the clouds and offered him the lead role in Ginhawa, which was loosely based on the life of icon Manny Pacquiao.

Andrew delivered an impressive livecast audition, what with his formal acting training and got the part. However, he had to lose weight in four months to be the boxer who came from poverty.  With training from coach Alfredo Fucio, customized meals and working with a boxing coach, Andrew slimmed down to 135 lbs and developed muscle cuts to look the part.

Andrew plays Anton, who takes up boxing after the death of his older brother, an aspiring boxer. He strives to bring his family out of hardship by going to Manila to compete.

To get into character, he slept in boxing gyms and pretended to be a boxer. He bonded and sparred with his "stablemates" who taught him to stay calm and focused whenever he got hit.

"I learned that when there are obstacles, you don't freak out. Move forward. I apply that principle in life," says Andrew.  

Ginhawa was presented in Cinemalaya 2022 and has been nominated in several award-giving bodies.

Passion projects

With his first acting award, Andrew hopes to get more opportunities. He admits that getting jobs has been challenging. Since he came back from the United States, he auditioned for commercials but always ended up in the short list.

"The competition is stiff. It's a numbers game. I'm part of this talent agency which has a roster of over 100. The casting calls and auditions are posted in the group chat. Everybody sends their auditions," he says.

Andrew prefers the on-site audition than the virtual one. Once he acted his socks off in a livestream only to find out that he was muted. The panel requested him to repeat his lines.

This year he landed a meaty role in the TV series Batang Quiapo, playing Bobby, the brother to Coco Martin's Hesus Nazareno. Andrew has been learning a different system in the teleserye — creating his lines on the fly. "They tell you a situation and you just do it. You learn to improvise in front of the camera," he says.

Andrew is looking forward to 2024. His manager has been lining up auditions with some international productions, and the actor is keeping his fingers crossed.