Do we like John Lloyd Cruz?
Our score: 6 out of 10. No harmful words or acts turned up and he has real prestige work behind him, but the record on how he treats people and what he stands for is thin.
John Lloyd Cruz is one of the Philippines' best-known leading men, and the thing that defines his later story is the break he took from showbiz. In a 2020 interview with Boy Abunda he explained that he needed to stop and reflect. He said he stopped for a long stretch but never fully quit working.
The comeback was not a fluffy one. In 2023 he won Best Actor at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland for Lav Diaz's Essential Truths of the Lake, a film about the drug war under the Duterte administration. That is a serious arthouse role, and he is the second Filipino actor to win that prize.
On the harm test, we found nothing nasty. No remarks about LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants, vaccines or the climate turned up in what we could read. The only political item was in April 2022, when PhilNews reported him joining a Pasig City councillor candidate's house-to-house campaign. That is a local campaign appearance, not a policy position.
The recent noise is relationship gossip. In January 2026 GMA reported breakup speculation, fuelled by the pair no longer following each other on Instagram, and said neither side had confirmed or denied it. Anything beyond that is tabloid territory, and several rumour pages we saw carried their own corrections.
The honest gap is that this is a quiet, private man, and the record on his kindness is thin. We found no court losses, no credible misconduct claims, and a career that has kept going on serious work. That is a pass on both tests, but without a long list of good deeds to point to, the score stays in the middle-to-upper range.