On the fifth day of his birth, Cyriac Alencheril’s mother died. Since then, the word “struggle” has been like his twin sibling. A Hollywood actor-producer born in Kerala, Cyriac has had an extraordinary life―he has been a Salesian missionary in the Hindi heartland, a bellboy in Kuwait and a paratrooper in the US military. The twists and turns in his life would make a gripping thriller.
“I was born as the seventh child of a 33-year-old mother during the India-Pakistan war of 1971,” he says. “My father was in the insecticides and pesticides business in Athirampuzha in Kottayam district. Even today, raising a child without breast milk and other necessities is tough. Imagine [how it was] 53 years ago. People pretty much said I wouldn’t survive… that I was a gone case.”
He carried the tag of being a ‘gone case’ throughout childhood. According to Cyriac, his curiosity often landed him in trouble, because of which he had to change schools several times.
A turning point came when he got into mischief in church. “I was an altar boy,” he says. “One Sunday morning, I took three small bottles of wine meant for mass. I didn’t know what wine tasted like, so in a moment of insanity, I took not just one, but three shots―bam, bam, bam! The sexton identified me as the culprit, and the vicar reported the incident to my disciplinarian father. I was beaten many times and sent to a boarding school, [after] my stepmom insisted that I needed to be sent away from home.”
The school was around 20 kilometres away. A maternal aunt paid for the admission, and Cyriac found the school a blessing in disguise. In his second year, he earned the title of best actor. He became an athlete, footballer, debater and emcee as well.
“I was in leadership positions, and I was part of the National Cadet Corps. But I wasn’t very good at studies,” he says. “And then I happened to read a story in THE WEEK about a school and Christian congregational facility in Ooty. So I went for a one-day vocation camp organised by Salesian fathers (members of a religious congregation named after the 17th century Geneva bishop Francis de Sales).”
Cyriac soon joined a Salesian seminary in Kolkata. “Salesians are some of the best trainers and educators. So I landed in the perfect place. But I was cutting corners and looking for excuses. I even called my sister in Indore, asking for help to get into a less strict congregation. I was trying to escape because [life] was very hard. You are always watched. You can only sleep for six hours. You had to always clean, mop, buff the floor, cook, work in the field and study,” he says.
But he found good things, too. “I could play football. I became a good tabla player and trained in singing and speaking, and polished my English,” he says.
Cyriac was sent to Indore, Bhopal, Jabalpur and Nagpur. He completed his degree and studied philosophy in Nagpur while selling books “to test my marketing skills”. He also got into trouble. “I was caught live on TV watching cricket at Vidarbha Stadium,” he says. “I was always a liberal thinker. I argued for more freedom for seminarians. So my superiors found me unfit, but I found favour with bishops.”
After studying philosophy, the congregation sent Cyriac to Jhabua, Madhya Pradesh, as a teacher. “I lived like a layman and taught children. At the end of the year, my authorities said I wasn’t good enough to return to the seminary for the theology course. So I went to Burhanpur, MP, for another year.”
There he made a costly mistake. While teaching his students about World War II, Cyriac mentioned an article that equated a hardline Indian politician to German chancellor Adolf Hitler. Rumours soon spread that he had hurt sentiments, and a mob came to his parish looking for him. Cyriac borrowed a two-wheeler from a kitchen staff and fled. “That was the end of my seminary life; nobody was there to support me,” he says.
He went to Mumbai to try his luck in Bollywood. “[I worked for] a Malayali filmmaker, Shashilal K. Nair. I used to carry his bag and do a lot of stuff. But I knew this was not enough; people called me a Madrasi and asked me to go to Kodambakkam [in Chennai] and try my luck there,” he says.
He wanted to move to the Gulf, so he returned to his hometown to retrieve his passport. There, he accidentally came across a recruitment drive for a temporary job and was selected. He got a one-month visa to Kuwait, where he managed to land a job in a top luxury hotel. “I was hired for a housekeeping job. I had to make 18 rooms a day,” he says.
He was soon assigned to look after the hotel’s pool-side cabanas. “I still don’t know whether that was a promotion or a demotion,” he says. “I had been stuck in the seminary, and now I was looking at white women in two-piece swimsuits all day.”
Then came another “mistake”. He slipped and fell into the pool one day. “I was drowning,” he says, “and the hotel general manager’s wife, an Australian lady, jumped in and saved me.”
But he could not save himself from getting fired. He could, luckily, extend his visa. He started picking up Arabic and appeared for interviews. “I found another hotel, Hyatt Regency, which had a Lebanese Catholic as its manager,” says Cyriac, whose language skills and seminary training helped him become an advertising executive at the hotel.
“All of a sudden, I went from third class to first class because it was an executive job. The old workplace was nearby, so I went there to show off. I contacted a lot of embassies and started gaining knowledge on how to fly out to the west.”
Later, Cyriac became the resident manager of a motel owned by a wealthy Kuwaiti. The motel had a dial-up internet connection, through which he became friends with an American woman who was interested in Indian culture. “I started falling in love with her,” Cyriac says. “She said, ‘I want to come over and see you.’ I said, ‘Be my guest.’ She flew to Kuwait the next morning.”
Cyriac proposed to her, and they registered their marriage at the American embassy. “Then,” he says, “I called my father: ‘Sorry to inform you late, but I got married.’ He was like, ‘What are you talking about? You left the seminary, and people are still mad at you. Now you are telling me you got married?’”
At his father’s instance, the couple had a Christian wedding in Kerala. “It became news, and we had a lot of uninvited guests,” says Cyriac. “A lot of people thought I was dead and gone. They started respecting me after my marriage to an American. The rich people invited us home. That one-month honeymoon was the best.”
By 2000, Cyriac was in the US and once again employed in the hotel segment. At a Marriott hotel, he hosted and befriended a retired army general. The general asked him whether he had a green card, and suggested that he attempt to enlist in the American military. “I didn’t know that was possible until then,” he says.
Cyriac was recruited as a parachute rigger, responsible for repairing, maintaining and repacking parachutes to ensure that they were fully reliable. After graduating from the US army’s airborne school, riggers have to complete 13 weeks of specialised training that ends with them jumping out of an aircraft in flight using a parachute that they themselves had packed.
“Not many qualify, because you need to complete five jumps. If you are a good jumper, only then can you pack parachutes,” says Cyriac. “All these soldiers who joined along with me were explorers, risk-takers. Compared to them, I was not soldier material at all. But here I was, becoming a paratrooper.”
He became Sergeant Alencheril and underwent extensive arms training. Interestingly, he no longer keeps arms. He and his wife Ancy, whom he married after divorcing his first wife, have two young boys. “Having a weapon with children in the house is not safe,” he says. “You can’t leave your weapon in a cupboard or a locker where kids can access it. They could put it in their school bag, take it to school and do something terrible.”
After training, Cyriac had his first posting at Fort Lewis army base near Seattle. He soon obtained US citizenship and had his clearance level raised, helping him gain access to sensitive material. His language skills, especially in Arabic, led him to being deployed as part of military intelligence in combat zones in Iraq.
“Saddam Hussein was killed while I was in Basra,” he says. “The memories from that phase in the combat zone are not pleasant. There were always RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades) flying around, burning pits, constant smoke, and loud blasts. I have trouble hearing in one ear because of the explosions. It was always noisy with helicopters whirling around. It was terrifying.”
After being discharged from the military, he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. “Acting became my therapy, a cathartic outlet to channel my emotions,” he says.
Using funds from the veterans’ educational assistance programme of the US military, Cyriac joined the prestigious New York Film Academy. “The academy became my boot camp where I honed my skills,” he says.
The film industry presented a new set of struggles. “Independent films, with their shoestring budgets and relentless hustle, were a far cry from the structured world of the military,” he says. “Yet, within the chaos, I discovered a thrilling freedom.”
Then came a turning point―a chance encounter with actor Gary Sinise on the set of Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders. “Witnessing Gary’s dedication, his meticulous attention to detail, and his deep respect for the craft inspired me,” he says.
Cyriac adopted the stage name Alen Matters, combining his surname and his father’s name, Mathew. From 2010 to 2015, he appeared in several episodes of Jimmy Kimmel Live!
Many of the roles that came his way have been stereotypes of Middle Eastern or Indian men. He has played the parts of a terrorist, driver, computer geek, and doctor in a number of Hollywood productions. In 2017, he became the executive producer and one of the lead actors in Nawal Enna Jewel, an English-Malayalam film that won a Kerala State Film Award and a slew of honours at international film festivals.
His experience in mainstream Malayalam movies in recent years has helped him note a major difference in work culture. In Indian film industries, he says, the treatment can be “rude and ruthless”. “In Hollywood, they give a lot of respect even to a background actor. But here, people sometimes ill-treat you without knowing who you are. Recently, on set, they were teaching me how to hold a nine-millimetre pistol, and I was like, ‘Okay, I am willing to learn,” says Cyriac, laughing.
He says it is his passion for Malayalam cinema that is driving him. He views his current struggles as an actor as similar to the ones he had in the past. Cyriac is confident that this time, too, he will be at the right place at the right time to earn his big break.