Liza Soberano. Image: @ofbecomingus via Instagram/@lizasoberano
Months after a bespectacled Liza Soberano asked her supporters to address her as “Hope” at an e-commerce ad, she clarified that she still wants to be known as “Liza” whenever she goes out in public.
Following her controversial “This is Me” vlog, the actress made headlines after saying that she wants to be known as “Hope” in a teaser for an e-commerce ad, which was shared on her Instagram account in February 2023.
“Please, call me Hope,” she said in the video, which refers to her first name in real life.
Despite this, Soberano admitted that she still gets surprised when people call her “Hope” instead of her stage name in public at an interview with Esquire Philippines, as she pointed out that her statement had been “misunderstood.”
“It’s actually very surprising to me because now, when I go out, people call me ‘Hope.’ I’ve been to concerts and stuff and people would scream ‘Hope! Hope!’ I love my name and everything, but now I was like, ‘Oh my God, I was so misunderstood,” she said. “Like this is not what I want. I still want to be known as Liza. And people comment on my Instagram, too. They ask, ‘Why is your name still Liza?’”
The “Forevermore” star also made a clarification that while her stage name was not “chosen for myself,” she wanted to show the public that there are two sides of herself as Liza and as Hope.
Soberano’s stage name was chosen by Star Cinema’s Malou Santos, according to a statement from her former talent manager Ogie Diaz on his vlog in February 2023.
“We were trying to be kind of meta with [the e-commerce ad]. When I’m an actress, when you know I’m a public figure, I’m Liza. And then there’s when I’m just being me or when I’m working on personal stuff or even like when I’m producing, directing, because I’m not the star,” she was quoted as saying. “So, I was kind of trying to show people that there are two sides of me: there’s Liza and there’s Hope.”
During the interview, the actress revealed that the backlash following her vlog was a “very stressful time” because she felt that she was being made an “outcast” by the public.
“Honestly, I didn’t imagine that things would turn out the way it did at the time. That period was a very stressful time for me because I felt very misunderstood. I felt in a way, more or less, like, I didn’t belong anywhere. I felt like I was being outcast,” she added.
The “Bagani” star also shared that she returned to the U.S. to spend time with her family and “reconnect with myself” following the incident, saying that the controversial vlog is a “learning lesson” that happened for a “reason.”
“I was sad about the way things turned out back then. But like, it’s also a learning lesson, you know, all everything that happened, happened for a reason and there was some bad but there was also some good and I’m just going to take everything that I learned from that and kind of become better,” she said in the interview.
Soberano also addressed the mix-up between her stage name and birth name in an interview with the Philippine Daily Inquirer, saying that the ad was meant to be a “clean slate” for herself as an artist.
The actress, who is set to appear in the film “Lisa Frankenstein,” recently made headlines after she was spotted with “Crazy Rich Asians” author Kevin Kwan and U.S.-based Filipino-American filmmaker Diane Paragas in New York, fueling speculations that she might be part of the movie sequel. EDV