Paolo Pangilinan

Paolo Pangilinan is a Filipino actor and model who had never acted before the role that brings him into this catalogue. He plays Karl Frederick “Archi” Almasen in Gaya sa Pelikula, released internationally as Like in the Movies (2020), an eight-episode Globe Studios series that went out on YouTube between 25 September and 20 November 2020 and reached Netflix in Southeast Asia, Hong Kong and Taiwan the following January.

His route to it ran through sport and modelling rather than drama. He read Sports Science at the University of the Philippines between 2013 and 2018, joined the UP Pep Squad in 2013, won the Mr and Ms Lukan contest in 2019, and did modelling and fast-food commercial work before being cast. At the time of the series he was in his second year at St Luke’s College of Medicine, which is an unusual thing to be doing while leading a drama.

The catalogue records what is documented and no more, and in his case that is not very much. His public filmography effectively begins and ends with this series; no later screen credit was verified for this page, and no agency representation, birth date or birthplace could be confirmed against a source worth citing.

One thing does need stating outright, because the alternative is to let readers assume it. He and his co-lead Ian Pangilinan are not related. They share a surname, which is common in the Philippines, and nothing else; the profile Rappler published when the series launched says so directly, noting that the two of them checked.

Where this record is thin: almost everywhere outside the series. There is no encyclopaedia article for him, the sources that exist are launch-period press coverage from 2020 and 2021, and this page carries the gaps openly rather than borrowing figures from aggregator sites.