Spain Stars of Tomorrow 2022: Carlos Cuevas (actor)

Carlos Cuevas was seven when he made his acting debut in 2003 in Catalan TV movie La Dona De Gel, and has not stopped working since. “I considered joining the Theatre Institute in Barcelona but I was doing a play at the National Theatre of Catalonia, so I thought it wouldn’t make much sense,” he recalls.

Instead, Cuevas signed up for a degree in literature studies at the University of Barcelona and continued to learn on the job, appearing in several Catalan television productions, including Ventdelplà and Merlí, and on stage in Caligula, Galileo and Romeo And Juliet. “I go back to the theatre whenever I can,” he says, “but shooting schedules often make that difficult.”

His first international productions were Manolo Caro’s Net­flix mini-series Someone Has To Die (The House Of Flowers) in 2020, alongside Carmen Maura, and Prime Video’s adventure series Boundless (Sin Límites), directed by Simon West. He made his English-speaking debut in eight-part historical series Leonardo (2021), starring Aidan Turner and Freddie Highmore. “I love learning languages,” says Cuevas who appeared this year in The Man From Rome, a Catholic thriller with Franco Nero as the Pope. “Catalan and Spanish aside, I feel confident in Italian and familiar with French.” Recent casting calls suggest more English-language roles are in the offing.

Among Cuevas’s latest work is Smiley for Netflix — “It’s about the relationship between two men who fall in love despite being very different and coming from different backgrounds” — and he has just finished shooting feature Tenderness (La Ternura) in the Canary Islands, for director Vicente Villanueva opposite Emma Suarez.

Auteur cinema is his passion, namechecking the work of Spanish filmmakers Carla Simon, Clara Roquet, Belén Funes, Carlos Marqués-Marcet, Carlos Vermut, Rodrigo Sorogoyen, as well as Xavier Dolan, Alice Rohr­wacher and Joachim Trier. “Starting so young I was lucky not to be aware for a long time of external pressures, what people think or say about your work. I felt free to experiment,” says Cuevas of his burgeoning career.

Contact: Borja de la Vega, Kuranda

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