Let’s laugh with Eugene Domingo

Get this: she’s a woman with a man’s name whose father treated her like a boy when she was a little girl. Now, as one of the top comedians in residence at ABS-CBN, she is starring in a show where she plays a fortune teller who casts a spell on a playboy to turn...

By Aprylle Liabres (Contributor)

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Published: Tue 29 May 2007, 10:40 AM

Last updated: Sat 4 Apr 2015, 8:47 PM

eughim into a girl—but the joke turns out to be on her when the spell backfires and turns her into a man!

The show is Love Spell, and in its Ellay Enchanted episode—which features the comebacking Jericho Rosales in the lead role and will run all Sundays of June on ABS-CBN—Eugene Domingo plays Madam Keller, an amateur fortune-teller who punishes womanizing band member Elloy (Jericho) by casting a spell to turn him into a girl. But Madam Keller makes the unfortunate mistake of reciting the spell in front of a mirror, which makes it bounce back. As a result, she turns into a man. To undo the effects of the spell, Elloy has to make a girl fall for him not as a man, but as a woman.

When Eugene, who was last seen onscreen in the blockbuster comedy Cute Ang Ina Mo, was offered the role, she didn’t have to think twice. “I’m a fan of Jericho, and I really wanted to work with him,” she says.

This is actually Eugene’s second time to appear in a Love Spell episode involving gender switching. She had a featured role in the first Love Spell episode, My Boy, My Girl featuring Gerald Anderson and Kim Chiu. Eugene played the part of Kim’s mother.

The funny thing is that with this new Love Spell episode, she didn’t even need to try that hard to play the role as the gender-bending fortune teller, because according to Eugene (whose real name is Eugenia, after an aunt on her father’s side) her father treated her like a little boy when she was a child. “I wasn’t your typical girl,” laughs Eugene. “I loved to horse around. I didn’t play with dolls; I preferred rough sports like basketball, running and jumping, and because of that, my father treated me like a boy.”

But there is nothing tomboyish about Eugene. She just happens to have a man’s name for a nickname, but she is all woman. The 35 year old comedienne (who will turn a year older in July) is happily single.

Although she doesn’t have a man in her life, she’s happy. “I have to be happy. I think it’s shameful not to be happy and appreciate what you have,” says Eugene.

She thinks different people have different ‘missions’ in life; her mission, right now, is to make people happy as well.


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