Alexandra Jiménez

A snap in her right foot ended her career as a dancer with the Cuban National Ballet at age fifteen. Alexandra Jiménez (Zaragoza, 1980) packed her pointe shoes into a box, got her bags ready, and enrolled at the Madrid-based TAI School to learn how to stand in front of a camera.

The Broken Bone That Saved the Comedian

For months, she went from one disastrous audition to another, landing silent extras in police series. But the phone finally rang for real in 2003, to play Africa in Los Serrano. That supporting role as a high school student was meant to last just four episodes.

The audience bought the character from the first minute.

So the screenwriters stretched her storylines to keep her for one hundred twenty-five episodes on the Globomedia sets. At that time, the show drew more than six million viewers every week. That twelve-hour daily military-style shooting schedule taught her the timing of a gag, that almost mathematical discipline where a mistimed blink ruins the punchline.

Millimeter-Precise Comedy and the Leap to the Big Screen

In 2009, Javier Ruiz Caldera gave her the lead role in Spanish Movie, a direct parody that brought in more than seven million euros at the box office. The actress built her sinister maid character without fuss or cheap caricature grimaces. She discovered that the jokes landed much harder when she delivered them with the seriousness of a funeral.

There was no turning back.

Spanish commercial cinema found a goldmine in her dry expressiveness. Suddenly came Promoción fantasma in 2012, Las brujas de Zugarramurdi in 2013 with Álex de la Iglesia, and Anacleto: agente secreto in 2015. On all those sets she followed the same rule: act as if she were in a Shakespearean tragedy while explosions and stunt performers fell from the ceiling around her.

The Dark Edge Behind Easy Laughs

Reducing her work to light comedy would ignore her hands-on engagement with drama. In 2010, she carried the television run of all two hundred forty-four episodes of La pecera de Eva, an almost experimental series shot against the clock where ninety percent of the scenes relied on pure improvisation opposite non-professional actors.

That experience opened the door to complex characters. In 2016, she won the Silver Biznaga at the Málaga Film Festival for 100 Meters, playing the everyday wear of living with multiple sclerosis. For that same film, the Catalan Academy awarded her the Gaudí Award. In 2021, Oriol Paulo cast her in the miniseries The Lincoln Lawyer as a homicide inspector haunted by guilt.

In 2023, she headlined Escándalo, relato de una obsesión, an eight-episode television production that sparked intense public complaints even before it premiered for telling the story of a relationship between an adult woman and a minor. Jiménez approached the shoot with restraint, avoiding any melodramatic crutches. In 2024, she racked up screen time with Buscando a Coque and Menudas piezas, a social comedy by Nacho G. Velilla shot in her hometown of Zaragoza.

For the film adaptation of 53 domingos in 2026, Cesc Gay cast her alongside Javier Cámara and Carmen Machi to shoot indoors during a tightly planned six-week schedule. The film's total production cost was audited at three and a half million euros.