Ana Torrent

The Gaze That Needed No Script

Víctor Erice was looking for specific eyes and found a six-year-old girl who didn't know what fiction was. In 1973, the release of The Spirit of the Beehive forced audiences to face Ana Torrent head-on. She wasn't playing a character. She was simply there, in front of a Frankenstein monster that didn't scare her because, to her, it was real.

And that absolute truth cut through the screen instantly.

Carlos Saura cast her in Cría Cuervos in 1976 and worked with her again on Elisa, vida mía a year later. Torrent grew up on film sets while the country was shedding its skin during the Transición. But she decided public exposure was not a comfortable place to live. She moved to New York to study with Uta Hagen because she needed technique to protect her natural instinct.

Silence was her best working tool.

The Assault on the Box Office

Alejandro Amenábar was a 23-year-old unknown when he handed her the script for Tesis. It was 1996, and Torrent accepted the role of Ángela, a film student obsessed with the violence of snuff movies. The film grossed more than 4 million euros at a time when Spanish cinema was desperately searching for new languages.

But the character demanded exhausting physical restraint over weeks of shooting in dark basements. That work earned her a Goya nomination for Best Actress. Her face returned to the magazine covers, though she kept turning down most of the scripts that reached her home.

She prefers long stretches of time and productive waiting.

In 1999 she worked with Julio Medem on Vacas and later joined big-budget international productions. In 2008 she played Catherine of Aragon in The Other Boleyn Girl alongside Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson. She earned a Hollywood-level salary, but returned to Madrid as soon as her shoot wrapped.

2023's Return to Their Roots

Decades passed, and Torrent chose her projects with almost surgical precision. In 2017 she took part in Verónica, directed by Paco Plaza, exploring genre cinema from a place of maturity. The industry took notice when her reunion with Víctor Erice was announced, fifty years after her debut.

In 2023, Close Your Eyes was released, and Torrent played Ana Arenas. The character closed an open circle in a village in Castile in the 1970s. The film was precisely about memory and the traces cinema leaves on the bodies of those who make it.

The production of Cerrar los ojos had a budget of 3 million euros. Its scenes were shot mainly on location in Granada, Almería and Madrid during the last quarter of 2022. The film had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in the Premiere section.