Buboy Villar became a household name for his comedy and musical skills, as well as his revelation on social media that he lived in at age 16 with an American woman, and, a year later, became the father of a baby girl. The following year, Villar sired a baby boy.
As it turned out GMA Network talent Angillyn Gorens was Villar's live-in partner from 2015 to 2018, though their separation was announced only in 2020.
Gorens is an American whose adoptive Filipino parents in the US took her to the Philippines in 2011 to attend high school. She joined GMA and appeared on shows without credits.
She met Villar while doing the primetime series Half Sisters and they became inseparable.
When they broke up, Gorens took their kids with her and went back to her parents.
The ex-couple have a co-parenting arrangement.
Gorens also got back as a Kapuso actor but soon decided to settle in the US early this year. She took her daughter with her, and her son was brought to the US by a relative just about a month ago. Villar saw the boy off at the airport.
Busy career
The separation enabled Villar to get busy with his showbiz career with full support from the Kapuso network. He's among GMA stars dubbed Sparklers, a brand coined by ABS-CBN's Star Magic talent management head Johnny Manahan who has moved to GMA 7 as consultant.
Villar stars in the celebrity reality game show Running Man Ph, an adaptation of Korea's show of the same title. The Philippine version was filmed entirely in South Korea with close supervision of the producers of the original show.
He's also a mainstay performer on GMA's weekly variety show All Out Sunday.
This year, at age 24, Villar debuts as a lead actor in Ang Kwento ni Makoy, a drama-comedy in which he plays a compassionate, optimistic, cheery but lowly paid hospital nurse.
He stars opposite Bella Thompson, who's incidentally a Filipino-American who grew up in Cebu. Thompson plays an author of success and self-help books who catches Covid-19.
She's a grumpy patient in a hospital headed by her doctor father whom she doesn't get along with.
Thompson's character is the story's narrator.
Ang Kwento ni Makoy is the first Filipino movie about nurses at work at the height of the pandemic. It is helmed by someone who's cryptically credited as "Direk HJCP."
Ang Kwento ni Makoy opens in theaters on 7 December.