For the longest time, Kyline Alcantara harbored resentment toward her father for leaving their family. It wasn’t healthy, she admitted.

Only when she decided to forgive him that she felt a huge weight had been lifted. And as she let him back into her life, so did the blessings. “My papa and I had an awkward relationship because I had this mindset that, ‘We can live without you.’ And it wasn’t good. When that was my way thinking … when I refused to forgive him, absolutely no blessings were coming in,” Kyline said in an interview at a press conference for her new afternoon soap, “Bilangin ang Bituin sa Langit.”

“But after we said sorry to one another, accepted one another’s flaws, and cleared the air, that’s when our lives started to get better,” she added.

Kyline’s parents had been estranged for 10 years, before their reconciliation four years ago. So, it was but expected that the 17-year-old GMA 7 talent had misgivings about the two getting back together.

“I was convinced that we could get by without him,” Kyline recalled. “Then, I noticed that my parents were being sweet to each other again. Seeing them that way made me so happy.”

And looking back, despite being surrounded by the love of her mother, family and friends, Kyline realized that she did yearn for a father figure.

“Having a man protecting, loving, guiding and teaching you things is still a different feeling,” pointed out Kyline who wants to have his father as her last dance in her 18th birthday party later this year.

Kyline grew up away from her brothers—the eldest stayed with their father; the second at their grandparents’ home in their native Bicol. “I prayed for this. I’m happy that we’re all together now,” she said.

“Bilangin,” a television adaptation of the 1989 big-screen drama of the same title, will have Kyline acting alongside the title’s original star, Nora Aunor, and other acclaimed actresses, like Mylene Dizon. It’s a challenge, she said. And one of her goals, she jested, is not get scolded by their director, Laurice Guillen, who herself is an accomplished actress.

“Well, that’s my goal with every director I work with—not to get yelled at! But Direk Laurice … nababaan niya na ako,” she related.

By “nababaan,” Kyline meant that Laurice was compelled to literally get down from the director’s booth to personally correct her mistakes.

“There are levels to that: First, it’s the assistant director who relays her instructions. If you don’t get it, she will talk to you via headset. If after that you’re still unable to give her what she wants, she will come down and speak with you. Luckily, when that happened to me, it was simply because of a small detail,” she said.

“My love interest (played by Yasser Marta) was visiting my home. And the scene called for me to serve him pandesal. I used my bare hands. It was my first instinct. But Direk Laurice reminded me that that’s something you do only with people you’re already close to. My character was still trying to get to know her suitor, so she said it would be better if I just emptied the bag’s contents on a plate,” Kyline related.

That was an instructive moment—the littlest of details matter. “But what I also love about Direk Laurice is that she does let you explore and treat the set as a playground. She suggests things that I could do, where I could improvise,” she said.

Working with “one-take” actresses like Nora and Mylene means double the pressure, Kyline admitted. “They work very fast and efficiently. One time, we finished more than 10 sequences in less than two hours. They would do one rehearsal, then nail the scene in one take,” she said.