CONSTRUCTION LAYERS top, jacket, and trousers. Photographed by JV Rabano for the June/July 2026 Issue of Vogue Philippines
As he neared the end of his run as Zach in A Chorus Line, Tony and two-time Grammy nominee Conrad Ricamora reflected on his return to the Philippines, his career, and life outside the spotlight.
It’s Wednesday before the closing weekend of A Chorus Line. When I arrive in Pasay, Conrad Ricamora is already midway through a shoot. Taylor Swift’s newest album hums in the background as he dances on a newly mounted platform. Ricamora insists that, unlike the ensemble, he’s not a trained dancer. But you wouldn’t know it watching him now.
By that Sunday, he’ll take a bow at the Samsung Performing Arts Theater to a sold-out crowd, capping off a critically acclaimed three-week run. A week from now, he and his husband, Peter Wesley Jensen, will be on the flight back to New York before heading to New Orleans, where Ricamora begins rehearsals for God of Carnage at Le Petit Theatre alongside longtime friend Julie Lake.
A year ago, the idea that Ricamora would be in the Philippines wasn’t even a possibility. Then an email arrived: an offer to play Zach in the 50th-anniversary production of A Chorus Line in Manila, sent by Clint Ramos, whom Ricamora first met 13 years ago while playing Ninoy Aquino in Here Lies Love. It was one of the first ways theater became a tether to a country he knew only through anecdotes.
The message opened a door that felt, in some ways, long overdue. At the tail end of January, Ricamora saw the Philippines for the first time from his airplane window, 60 years after his father left the archipelago, and found himself overcome with emotion.
“I couldn’t get the image of my dad as a little boy flying away and looking at those same mountains and islands that I’m now seeing,” says Ricamora. “It’s like I can see him on the plane across from me through that window. As I was landing, he was taking off.”
Ricamora is keenly aware that this homecoming was made possible by a career that began almost by accident. While pursuing a psychology degree at Queens University of Charlotte, he enrolled in an acting class on a whim. “I was randomly assigned this monologue about a boy who was meeting his estranged parent for the first time,” says Ricamora. “I read it and I was like: ‘I have gone through and felt these exact things. I don’t need to act this [out]. It could be my experience, even though it was written by an author I have never met.”
Community theater filled his early years as an actor. He earned USD 300 a week playing Benvolio in Romeo and Juliet and a handful of other characters in The Taming of the Shrew for the North Carolina Shakespeare Festival. “It wasn’t glamorous,” he says. “But to me, it was amazing to get paid to act that much full-time.” He started picking up small on-screen roles, including a brief appearance as a nervous DMV officer in Adam McKay’s Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. “We were in this car all day and I talked to Will Ferrell about shooting Anchorman,” he says. “He just said: ‘I just write stuff that my friends and I think are funny. Then we shoot it. That’s it. It’s not any more complicated than that.’”
Ricamora broke through in 2014 as Oliver Hampton in Shonda Rhimes’ How To Get Away With Murder. But even then, he resisted the idea of “making it.” Early on, when he was encouraged by an agent to relocate to LA and audition for what would eventually be I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry, he turned it down. “I never had the mindset of ‘making it’,” he says. “I just wanted to keep doing shows and telling stories.”
He brought the same discipline he had as a collegiate tennis scholar to acting. In the years that followed, Ricamora moved fluidly between stage and screen, eventually returning to Here Lies Love on Broadway and originating the role of a deeply closeted Abraham Lincoln in Cole Escola’s breakout comedy Oh, Mary!, shepherding it from its Off-Broadway run at the Lucille Lortel Theater to its Broadway transfer in the Lyceum. The performance earned him his first Tony nomination. When Filipino broadcaster Karen Davila asked him how being a two-time Grammy nominee and a Tony nominee changed his life, he deflected with humor: “It changes the way I’m introduced in interviews!”
By the time the offer to play Zach arrived, Ricamora had already built up the kind of quiet confidence and authority that the role demands. In A Chorus Line, Zach is a seemingly omnipresent director with a booming voice that cuts auditionees, pushing them to reveal their personal truths and secrets. While the role has no solo of its own, director and choreographer Karla Puno Garcia amplifies Ricamora’s presence by placing him among the audience members in the orchestra and loge sections throughout the show. As critic Vincen Gregory Yu’s review succinctly put: “You do not doubt for a second that this director is not messing around, but you also feel it in your bones that he genuinely cares for his dancers.”
Ricamora understands that tension intimately. Two weeks into rehearsals, life echoed art. He received an email from director David Frankel: his role in The Devil Wears Prada 2 had been cut following test screenings. The irony wasn’t lost on him. “My whole job [in A Chorus Line] is to cut people from this audition. Then to be myself getting cut out of this movie? The industry is brutal,” says Ricamora. “But it happens regardless of whether your performance is great. If they go back to the editing room and it doesn’t make sense for the overall movie, they have to. They can’t just hold onto it because they liked you and you were funny.”
“To come here and experience the pride people have for this country…it’s given me part of my humanity.”
He hasn’t always had the distance to look at the bigger picture, to believe that he has a right to be there. “When I was an infant, my biological mom left,” he says. “You learn that disappointment really early and so it kind of primed me for this life and career.” Ricamora started therapy in his 20s and would even go on retreats with people who’ve experienced similar traumas. “The business is hard. Any rejection that I’ve ever felt through auditions pales in comparison to that initial rejection,” he says. “It wasn’t until my early 40s that I felt like that chapter [of my life] really closed for me…If I could survive that, I could survive anything.”
Growing up in Niceville, Florida, as one of the only Filipino kids in his community compounded these feelings of isolation and invisibility. Ricamora came of age during a time when Asian characters were often confined to stereotypes onscreen: the sexless nerd, badass martial arts expert, or the comic relief a la Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It wasn’t until Daniel Dae Kim was in J.J. Abrams’ Lost that he ever saw an Asian man “be strong, sexy, and powerful” in a way that was aspirational.
Now, Ricamora is part of the generation challenging and reshaping those narratives. Being in the Philippines has affirmed this direction. In Florida, he was the only brown kid in the room. Here, the rooms are full of them. “When you grow up in America, you think America is all there is,” he says. “I’ve always lived in a place where I was a minority. So to come here and experience the pride people have for this country, in everything from fashion and theater to visual arts and culinary arts, it’s given me part of my humanity that I never would have been able to [recover] if I didn’t come here.”
Compared to the grueling eight-show weeks in Broadway and the long hours of network television, his schedule in Manila has offered room to breathe. Between rehearsals and performances, he and Jensen have found time to explore Manila, visiting Art Fair Philippines, wandering through Salcedo’s weekend markets, and trying every culinary delicacy possible. In February, the two spent Valentine’s Day and Ricamora’s birthday indoors, amused by the volume of red heart-shaped balloons and overpriced roses on the street.
His partnership with Jensen has been integral to grounding his life offstage. They met three years ago while Ricamora was filming How to Die Alone in Toronto. “It’s hard to date because people move to New York to climb a ladder. There’s this feeling that everybody is looking for something better. Nobody is looking for a true partner to settle down with,” says Ricamora. “If I’m going to get married, I always wanted to find a lifelong partner. I wanted us to prioritize each other over careers and anything like that.”
They knew they were in it for the long haul after their pets, Presley and Wilbur, got along at a Rihanna Superbowl Watch Party held days after they met. When the two got married later that year, Ricamora went straight from the ceremony to a technical dress rehearsal for Here Lies Love. Afterward, the entire cast gathered in their apartment and hung out over drinks and pizza in celebration.
Their time in Manila has only deepened that partnership. “The fact that we came here and he immediately picked up Jose Rizal’s books and started reading it and wanted to explore the city, go to Intramuros, learn about history,” says Ricamora as he squeezes Jensen’s hand in gratitude. “I’m not just coming here to do a show. I’m coming home to where my dad and my ancestors are, for the first time ever. It’s deeper and he gets that. He holds space for that and respects that a lot.”
Ricamora doesn’t know how long he’ll want to keep acting. What he does know is that it’s always offered him a way to begin again. “One of the biggest tragedies of being a human is that you only get to live one life and I feel like as an actor, you get to live several lives and I love that about it,” he says. In Manila, that idea of starting over has changed and has made him consider staying for longer. “I wasn’t aware of it until I came here [but] I always felt the need to try hard just to feel like I belonged,” says Ricamora. “Here, there’s a part of me that can soften, that doesn’t always feel like I have to prove something. Here, I can relax.”
By JASON TAN LIWAG. Photographs by JV RABANO. Talents: Conrad Ricamora & Peter Ricamora-Jensen. Managing Editor: Jacs Sampayan. Beauty Editor: Joyce Oreña. Fashion Editor: David Milan. Art Director: Jann Pascua. Beauty Writer & Associate: Bianca Custodio. Fashion Associate: Neil de Guzman. Producer: Mavi Sulangi. Multimedia Artist: Mcaine Carlos. Videographer: Angelo Tantuico. Makeup: Pam Robes. Hair: JA Feliciano. Nails: Extraordinail. Photography Assistant: PJ Salazar. Shot on location at F.A.B. Creatives.
Special thanks to Jojie Lloren and Apartment 1B.
