Liza Soberano confirms she and Enrique Gil broke up three years ago
Liza Soberano and Enrique Gil have broken up, the actress confirmed.
For the first time, the actress revealed that she and her former love team had gone their separate ways three years ago.
"I've been honestly itching to tell people this, because I haven't been very truthful. Quen hasn't been very truthful," Soberano said on the Aug. 14 episode of Can I Come In?, a podcast-cinema-documentary by director Sarah Bahbah.
"Quen and I broke up," Soberano said, adding that they have been broken up for almost three years.
She said that the reason why they haven't formally announced this to the public was that Gil asked her "not to say anything."
"Originally, the reason why we haven't said anything about it is because Enrique or Quen asked me not to say anything about it first, and I think I don't want to speak for him," she said.
"But I think it was coming from a place of not wanting it to be real. And at the same time, you know, I agreed to that because I also didn't want it to be real," she reflected.
The actress said she was afraid that her fans wouldn't "love" her anymore if people found out they had broken up.
"This is coming from the people pleaser side of me because I was so afraid that if people found out that we weren't together anymore, my career would go bad, or, you know, people just wouldn't love me anymore," she said. "And so it's like, I just it was me again, like just pretending or putting, putting the things that I need to do for myself off to make other people happy and to make feel safe."
'We weren't a match anymore'
Despite the love they shared, Soberano felt guilty as she looked back on her breakup with Gil. She said that a year prior to their breakup, she already saw "signs" that she was unhappy, but ultimately ignored them as she was afraid of confrontation.
"But because I had built up this kind of toxic habit of pushing away anything that I felt like bothered me, because I was afraid of confrontation, I decided to just swallow it, or, like, sweep everything under the rug," she told Bahbah.
"I accepted that there were certain things about him that I wasn't okay with, and that it's just always going to be like that. And that's just life, like you have to win some, lose some. You have to deal with the good and the bad. So I was, like, mentally telling myself these things, because we were already, at that point, almost eight years together, and I was genuinely expecting us to get married," she revealed.
Soberano described her breakup with Gil as "beautiful" and "so full of love," explaining that the decision was difficult because she still loves him as a person.
She reflects on their relationship fondly, seeing only "good moments," and thinks of Gil as her "childhood best friend."
Despite feeling guilty for not being able to sustain the relationship as their fans would have wanted, she ultimately chose to end it because she "needed to find [her]self and grow too."
"And there's there were things that I knew that I shouldn't tolerate for the people that look up to me, for the younger me, and also for my future children. And that's not to say that he's a bad person. He didn't do anything bad. Nothing bad happened. Our breakup was really good. It was just
we weren't a match anymore," she explained.
Soberano says she was 'very much deeply in love' with Gil
In the same video, Soberano discussed what love teams are in the local entertainment industry, calling it a "fantasy" that she treated as a "safety net."
"When I started working with my love team, it was the first time that I truly felt like I wasn't alone. Through my love team, I gained a lifelong best friend, my first love. But also, it's when all the violence and abuse stopped, because I started also earning more and being able to pay for things by myself. I was able to take myself out of poverty because of the love team, and I was able to do all the things that I couldn't before, without people bringing me down. So yeah, the love team was a safety net, but also like an armor for me," she explained before recalling how she first realized she was in love with Gil.
Soberano also recalled going under a lot of pressure "to be someone worthy of looking up to" and "to please" their LizQuen fans. At that time, she had difficulty setting up boundaries between what to share with the public and what to keep for themselves as a couple.
"I just always obeyed the cardinal rule of not admitting that we were actually in a relationship, but we would constantly tease the fans and kind of lead them on. I mean, we were actually together, so we're not leading them on, but we wouldn't give them that final 'Yes' until we felt like it was the right time, which happened five years later, I believe," the Lisa Frankenstein actress said, expressing that it felt very "freeing to not keep a secret anymore."
Soberano told Bahbah that she was "very much deeply in love" with Gil, but there were moments when she would question the things she would do in public.
"I didn't know if I did that from a place of love, from being a proud girlfriend or to please other people," she said, but noting that she never had to pretend she was in love with Gil.
"But even if you're fighting and angry, love is still there. Yeah, I think it's just a question or a matter of 'were all my actions truthful and or did they feel truthful to me in a moment,'" she said.
Soberano and Gil's tandem, LizQuen, debuted in the teleserye Forevermore in 2014. They have been in a relationship for the past eight years, though they only went public about their status in 2019.
Rumors that the two have split have been going around since May 2023, though they have repeatedly shut down the speculations in separate interviews.
In February 2024, Gil dismissed the rumors, noting they’re both just "super busy." He also said that he will "always support" her. A month later, Soberano held a block screening for Gil's film I am Not Big Bird.
The ex-love team even teased a possible project, promising fans "something new."
"Quen and I were discussing because he is also producing as well and he has already had two successful movies so we're trying to come up with a concept we can do together in the future," Soberano said.
"I can't guarantee it is gonna be in the next year because the concept that we're coming up with needs to be fleshed out, to say the least, but it is something new," she continued.
