Begoña Vargas

Dance as an Escape

Begoña Vargas didn't wait for anyone's permission to become an actress. At ten years old she was already spending her afternoons at a dance school in Loeches, her hometown in Madrid, drilling steps and learning that the body communicates before the voice does. That physical training explains why her characters always have a presence that fills the frame, even when they don't speak.

Her arrival on national television came in 2018 with the series La otra mirada. She played Roberta, a student at a finishing school for young women in 1920s Seville. The role demanded a mix of innocence and trauma that caught the attention of casting directors across the country.

And the industry took notice.

In 2019, she joined the cast of Alta mar, a period production where mystery and luxury served as the backdrop. But her real interest lay in genre cinema and in gritty stories. Before filming, she reads the script looking for the flaws in her characters, because she has no interest in perfect figures.

Building a Quinqui Identity

Horror cinema gave her her first opportunity on the big screen with Malasaña 32 in 2020. It was a grueling shoot in which she had to carry the emotional weight of a family falling apart in a cursed apartment in Madrid. But it was Daniel Monzón who gave her the character that defined her early career.

As Tere in Las leyes de la frontera (2021), she was no ordinary girl from the neighborhood. Vargas built a woman who was the driving force behind a gang of criminals in Girona in the late 1970s. She earned a nomination for Best Revelation Actress at the Actors Union Awards thanks to a performance that avoided the caricature of traditional quinqui films.

To prepare for the role, she spent weeks studying the way women of the era walked and looked at people. The result was a magnetic presence that outshone her co-stars in every shared scene.

But success is not a straight line.

After the impact of Monzón's film, she decided to explore big-budget productions. In 2022 she starred in Bienvenidos a Edén, a series that explored the dark side of fame and social media. That project allowed her to connect with a massive global audience through streaming platforms.

The Assault on the Global Market

In 2023, she joined the world of La casa de papel through the spin-off Berlín. She plays Cameron, a woman with a turbulent past who joins a gang of robbers in Paris. The project marked a major shift in scale, both technically and professionally, given the size of the production and the demands of the action scenes.

She worked side by side with Pedro Alonso on a shoot that lasted several months across different European locations. For her, the key isn't fame (which she handles with an almost obsessive discretion) but the quality of the creative process.

The gamble paid off.

Vargas balances her work in front of the camera with her passion for fashion, though always as a professional tool rather than an end in itself. In 2024 Netflix confirmed the renewal of Berlin for a second season after it reached number one in more than 90 countries during its first week on air.

Filming of the new episodes was scheduled for 2025 under the direction of Álex Pina and Esther Martínez Lobato.