Antonio de la Torre

In the early nineties, Antonio de la Torre was reading Andalusian soccer results on camera for Canal Sur. He had just earned a degree in Journalism in Madrid and kept a notebook full of casting calls that rarely went well. While paying his rent with sports desk shifts, he attended Cristina Rota's acting school in the afternoons to learn how to perform without showing the effort.

The first directors who worked with him gave him minimal roles. He played a waiter in Los peores años de nuestra vida in 1994, a traffic cop in El día de la bestia in 1995, and a tavern thug in minor productions where his name barely appeared in the end credits.

It took more than a decade to move beyond bit parts with a few lines.

The turning point came when Daniel Sánchez Arévalo cast him in his debut feature, AzulOscuroCasiNegro, released in 2006. The role of an imprisoned brother who seeks to have a child through prison visits broke him out of the rut of comic cameos and earned him his first Goya Award for Best Supporting Actor in 2007.

The Physical Price of the Method

Two years after the award, Sánchez Arévalo called him back for Gordos, a project that forced the Malaga-born actor through a physically risky transformation. He had to gain thirty-three kilos in record time to play a therapist trapped by his own contradictions.

Filming stopped for months so he could eat without restraint.

The production schedule required shooting the most physically demanding scenes first and then having him lose all that weight under medical supervision while the cameras sat idle. That metabolic punishment left him with arrhythmias and a second nomination, but it also set a pattern of physical commitment that darker directors were quick to take advantage of.

In 2012 he went on to make Grupo 7 with Alberto Rodríguez and Invasor with Daniel Calparsoro, earning a double nomination for both lead and supporting roles at once. So by the time Manuel Martín Cuenca put him at the center of Caníbal in 2013, his face had become synonymous with restrained tension and heavy silences.

The Racing Pulse of Power

In 2018 Rodrigo Sorogoyen handed him the script for El reino, a film that built its rhythm around the unraveling of a regional party official cornered by the courts. The camera followed the actor's neck through luxury restaurants, lawyers' offices, and yachts in a single unbroken take that gave viewers no respite.

And the frenetic editing turned his panting breath into the exact pulse of institutional plunder.

That performance earned him the Goya Award for Best Actor in 2019, and with it he became the male performer with the most nominations from the Spanish Academy, with fourteen nods.

That same year he starred in La trinchera infinita, playing a Civil War fugitive who hid for three decades behind a plaster wall. Yet the psychological toll of working in such dark spaces did not slow down his workload.

In 2024 he shot the intimate drama Los destellos under the direction of Pilar Palomero and joined the ensemble comedy Tratamos demasiado bien a las mujeres by Clara Bilbao. In 2025 he traveled to the coast of Huelva to film the thriller Los tigres alongside Alberto Rodríguez, adding more than one hundred thirty professional productions to his career record.

While filming that movie in Atlantic waters, he spent entire days underwater in a heavy diving suit at a depth of ten meters, battling currents of four knots.