Alex Mallari Jr. in “The Adam Project”
It’s widely known that Filipino Canadian actor Alex Mallari Jr. (“The Adam Project,” “Dark Matter,” “Ginny and Georgia”) took up Criminology at the University of Toronto before he pursued a career in acting. But the 34-year-old actor was recently “reminded” by his second-grade self what he had wanted to be all along: an actor.
“To be honest, I have no idea what a criminologist does (laughs),” Alex admitted in a recent interview. “I was 16 or 17 at the time. I was like, ‘Is that what lawyers do?’ I wanted to be a lawyer. So I thought criminology led to law school.
Playing a villain
“Or politics? But that is a world I do not want to dabble in. Maybe that’s the thing—I just couldn’t figure out what I wanted to do. So I thought criminology led to law school.
“It’s funny. After I booked the role in ‘The Adam Project,’ my mom went back to my childhood notebooks from school, and she found one from second grade. I guess I forgot at some point that what I wanted then was to be an actor.
Mallari in “Dark Matter”
“It was probably a day where you had to draw out what you want to be when you grow up, and I had drawn a Hollywood sign, and me playing a villain. I had a bag of money and a gun, and I’m telling the cops, ‘Put your hands up!’ This was in the second grade! So, I told my mom, ‘What the heck did you let me watch, first of all (laughs)?’
“It made me realize a couple of things. One, what was I watching and why did I see myself as a villain? OK, cool. That was probably because I only ever saw colored people [playing villains] in the movies in the ‘90s. “Did I simply go toward that aspect of me? Because, really, I was a happy-go-lucky kid who had a wonderful childhood. Or maybe it was just a side of me that I fantasized about, like, ‘What would it be like to not follow rules?’ Imagine that (laughs)!”
Whatever the answers to his questions may be, Alex knows that he has truly found his calling—and he’s more than happy to answer it. INQ