“If I wanted to be one of the best of my generation, I have to study where (the) real standard of acting was set,” consummate actor Jake Cuenca said when he decided to study acting at the famous Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute in New York in 2014, the only school in the world that teaches Lee Strasberg’s Method Acting, described as a form of acting where the actor mystically “becomes” the character or tries to somehow literally live the character in life, and regarded as the home of acting legends like Marlon Brando, James Dean, Al Pacino, Robert de Niro, Marlon Brando, and Dustin Hoffman.
Jake, one of the hottest Filipino actors, won his very first best actor award at the International Film Festival Manhattan (IFFM) in New York in 2014 for his performance in Diane Ventura’s Mulat (Awaken), the same movie that recently won for him his second best actor at the 2016 World Cinema Festival in Copacabana, Brazil.
“It feels good to win an international award for the second time for Mulat, an indie film, which I made a long time even before entering the Lee Strasberg acting school,” Jake said of his recent win. Jake got his first international acting nomination at the Queens World Film Festival 2014 as best actor in Joseph Israel Laban’s Nuwebe.
Jake was born in California of Spanish-Filipino parents. He was discovered by Cosmo Modeling Agency at the age of nine in Manila. He said he is considering to take up further acting lessons abroad, possibly at Stella Adler’s or Ivana Chubbuck’s. The alumnus of Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute is busy shooting for the Kapamilya TV series Because You Love Me on location in Mindoro with co-stars Gerald Anderson and Yen Santos as a follow-up to the top-rating ABS-CBN soap Pasion de Amor.
With a much-awaited TV series, more commercial endorsements and future stints in film festivals abroad, Jake’s lessons in Method acting is surely starting to pay off.
