Dani Martín

In 1994, Fernando León de Aranoa shot his first short film on 35 mm and put in front of the lens a seventeen-year-old kid who delivered orders for his father. His name was Dani Martín and he had trained at Cristina Rota's school. That nine-minute film, titled Sirenas, earned nothing at the box office, but it served as the first on-screen record of a performer with a rough, magnetic physical presence.

In the following decade, the general public associated him with sold-out stadiums through his band. But on film sets he never stopped being a method actor who rehearsed lines until he wore the role down.

The screen doesn't forgive artifice.

Bigas Luna's Polygon

In 2001, Joaquín Oristrell gave him a role in Sin vergüenza alongside Verónica Forqué. That ensemble comedy taught him to fine-tune his comic timing alongside heavyweights of Spanish stage and screen, and to gauge tone in comedy.

Five years later, Bigas Luna called him to co-star in Yo soy la Juani. The Catalan director was looking for street-smart guys with sharp edges and a dash of rebelliousness that you don't learn from acting manuals.

Martín played Jonah, the possessive boyfriend of Verónica Echegui, in a shoot charged with gasoline, industrial estates and neighborhood brawls. The film flopped at the domestic box office with barely three million euros, but specialized critics acknowledged that the violent chemistry between its two leads carried the entire runtime.

And Dani Martín took the craft seriously.

The Precinct's Trenches

In 2007, production company Globomedia offered him the lead role in the police series Fuze for Cuatro. The technical premise was demanding for any actor: solving a case on the edge in episodes built around constant time jumps.

As Chief Inspector Corso, Martín shared scenes with Bárbara Lennie and Álex González over two seasons and twenty-nine episodes. They shot 14-hour days with handheld cameras and grueling long takes that left little room for doubt.

So the wear and tear took its toll. The series averaged a 10.1% audience share in its opening episode before suffering erosion in late-night ratings against direct competition.

Nobody can keep up that pace for two years in a row.

Almodóvar's Detour and the Retreat

In 2009, Pedro Almodóvar cast him in a brief appearance in Broken Embraces, where he shared the frame with Penélope Cruz under the strict direction of the filmmaker from La Mancha. It was a fleeting collaboration that closed out the most visible stretch of his film career.

As the decade turned, music took up nearly all of his time, apart from occasional appearances in documentaries such as Aute Retrato in 2019 and the film about Coque Malla in 2022. In 2024, he briefly returned to the screen with the conceptual short film for his album El último día de nuestras vidas, directed by Miguel Bueno and José Bosch.

In 2026, he completed a series of ten concerts at Madrid's WiZink Center with 170,000 tickets sold in under seventy-two hours. For that run of dates, the production contract called for a 300-square-meter center stage and 240 tons of technical equipment suspended over the floor.