MANILA — From a work meeting into an unexpected romance. Actor Jericho Rosales revealed in an interview that he did not expect to find love again in Janine Gutierrez.

In an interview with Karen Davila on her vlog, Rosales fondly recalls how he made his first move to ask Gutierrez for a date.

“One day, I asked her ‘Would you like to do a script reading with me?’ That was, I’m sure she has the version of the story, but why would I ask for a script reading, when she’s the only person I haven’t worked with,” Rosales said in the interview.

At first, the actor believes that he needs to find a connection with Gutierrez since they will be working on a project together as husband and wife.

“She was going to be my work wife, my wife in the show. All of the issues and decisions that my character was going to do with the show is because of the relationship they have. This is not an easy working relationship and we needed to,” he said.

“So in my head, ‘o coffee, script reading, and coffee’. So I asked her, I brought with me my iPad and then we saw each other at the cafe and then I brought my iPad out and then she started laughing and ‘holy God, you had an iPad’ and I said ‘Yes this is a work meeting.’ So to cut the long story short, six hours later, we never got to open the iPad,” he added.

As he went on recalling their first meeting, the actor admitted that they never realized that they spent quality time together.

“It ended like Japanese food at 3 p.m. and then she went to her Lola Pilita Corrales and that’s it. And I was, ‘Wow, I can spend like three hours talking to this girl’… That’s when I felt something,” he said.

Knowing the relationship he had with Kim Jones for more than 10 years, the actor revealed that he already “dealt” with some issues before he re-entered the dating scene.

“I had to deal with that. But you know, I was already into the dating scene because Kim (Jones) and I split up in 2019 but of course, there were a couple of years pa that we had to work on stuff. We used to be together during the pandemic so we were like everything was expedited and we weren’t able to fix things, and then I went dating,” he said.

“But during the dating phase, I always had a feeling of okay, dealing with a lot of things inside and being afraid to ‘would I be able to love again’ na parang ganun, I dealt with that before I started really like seeing people,”  he explained.