Carlos Rivera

In 2004 Carlos Rivera won the third season of the talent competition La Academia on Mexican television and discovered the next day that TV fame fades within weeks. Local production companies were looking for a compliant face to fill daytime shows. Rivera had other plans and chose to get his start in small-scale theater productions in Mexico City.

Nobody expected much from a young unknown from the provinces on Madrid's Gran Vía.

Taking On the Gran Vía

In 2011 the production company Stage Entertainment was looking for a lead for the Spanish premiere of The Lion King. Rivera sent a homemade recording from Mexico with few expectations, but the casting team in Madrid halted auditions as soon as they saw the video. They bought him an urgent plane ticket and gave him the lead role of adult Simba.

For three seasons he performed more than 700 consecutive shows at the Teatro Lope de Vega in Madrid. That vocal and physical discipline changed his method forever. Because singing suspended from a harness ten meters in the air while wearing a mechanical mask weighing several kilos leaves no room for artifice.

In 2012 Spanish critics awarded him the best breakout actor prize at the BroadwayWorld Spain Awards. The Madrid theater community then concluded that this foreign performer was not a face out of a talent contest but a disciplined stage actor.

And the move paid off perfectly.

The Television Adaptation and the Pixar Filter

In 2015 he returned to Mexico City to lead the cast of the Mexican version of the same musical. With that production, Rivera surpassed a thousand performances playing the Disney character. That technical experience caught the attention of television producers looking for actors capable of carrying long-running dramas.

In 2016 Televisa offered him the role of Andrés Salinas in El hotel de los secretos, the Mexican adaptation of the Spanish series Grand Hotel. The shoot demanded a restraint in gesture far removed from the usual style of Latin American melodrama. Rivera played his scenes alongside veteran actors with a understatement that surprised the network's directors.

A year later, Pixar signed him to perform the main theme of the animated film Coco. In 2017 he recorded the Spanish-language version of Remember Me, written by Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez. The film earned more than $800 million at the global box office, and the song won the golden statuette at the 2018 Academy Awards.

But the studio did not limit itself to his singing voice. In 2019 Jon Favreau directed the digital version of The Lion King, and Disney once again brought Rivera on to voice the lead character in Spanish for the Latin American market.

The Weight of Live Performance

Musical theater demands an athlete's lungs and the memory of a supporting actor.

In 2022 Rivera once again led a large-scale production as lead actor and co-producer of José el soñador at the Centro Cultural Teatro 1 in Mexico City. The staging used a wraparound LED screen of 400 square meters and a technical setup unprecedented in the Hispanic commercial theater scene. Rivera worked with Andrew Lloyd Webber's company to ensure the original score was faithfully performed.

So alternating between TV studios and stages was never a detour but a carefully planned work routine. During his 2023 international tour, he performed sixty dates in major venues without relying on pre-recorded vocal tracks at any show.

In July 2024 he celebrated two decades in the business with a three-and-a-half-hour recital at Arena Ciudad de México in front of 22,000 attendees. The show featured forty-two songs performed live, twenty-two costume changes, and a sixteen-piece session orchestra on stage.