Itziar Ituño

Long before the red jumpsuit and Dalí-style masks, almost no one outside the Basque Country knew her face. To Basque viewers she was Nekane Beitia, a regional police officer who joined the daily soap Goenkale to solve a three-episode storyline and ended up staying for fourteen consecutive seasons on the schedule.

Itziar Ituño was born in Basauri in 1974 and studied Urban-Industrial Sociology at the University of the Basque Country while training in acting at the drama school in her hometown. Those university years shaped a sharp political outlook that she later brought to each of her characters.

Nobody handed her a single role.

Because on regional television the pace of work bordered on relentless, with marathon days in which fifteen scenes were shot daily with barely any time to rehearse. That set was her true dramatic conservatory.

The San Sebastián Phone Call and the Oscar Letter

For years she alternated between the stage and supporting roles and short-term contracts that barely covered her basic expenses. But in 2014, directors Jon Garaño and Jose Mari Goenaga trusted her to co-star in Loreak.

That film, shot entirely in Basque, competed for the Golden Shell at the San Sebastián Festival and was chosen by the Academy in 2015 to represent Spain at the Oscars. Critics immediately noticed her restrained gestures, capable of conveying loneliness without theatrics or emotional overemphasis.

The film did not make the final cut for the Academy of Hollywood. It had to settle for modest box office returns in theaters and a flawless run through international film festivals.

And that quiet work served as a direct passport to the screen tests being held in Madrid.

The inspector who flipped the board

When the network Antena 3 premiered Money Heist in May 2017, viewership declined steadily and the production was written off after its second batch of episodes. The series seemed destined to gather dust in the archive.

The algorithm blew up the planet.

Late that same year, Netflix added the series to its global catalog with no prior promotional campaign. Within months, Inspector Raquel Murillo became a familiar face to more than sixty million households that devoured the plot from Brazil to Turkey.

Ituño handled that sudden fame without leaving her apartment in Basauri or cutting ties with her usual circle. She kept her rock band INGOT active, kept singing at local festivals, and calmly weathered online harassment campaigns when part of the commercial press questioned her presence at social protests.

The Physical Weight of the Camera

She had no stunt doubles for many of her scenes.

In 2022 she led the cast of Intimidad, a serialized production in which she played a politician subjected to public ridicule after a private intimate video was shared without consent. The role earned her unanimous recognition from the Spanish audiovisual industry for the harshness with which she portrayed institutional humiliation.

That same year she shot in three-degree-below-zero conditions in the forests of Navarre to play the goddess Mari in the fantasy feature Irati, directed by Paul Urkijo. In 2023 she joined Sílvia Munt in the drama Las buenas compañías and once again played Raquel Murillo in two episodes of the spin-off series Berlin.

Her career began to take off on the other side of the Atlantic. In Argentina she starred in the thriller Lateral Thinking, a suffocating shoot that kept her locked in an industrial warehouse for four weeks in Buenos Aires, sharing the frame with Alberto Ammann.

In 2024 she returned to public television with Detective Touré, playing Txaro. The following year she wrapped filming on The Gentleman and released the feature film La deuda in theaters, directed by Daniel Guzmán after ten years of financial setbacks.

To finance that last film, the production company took out an emergency bank loan worth 800,000 euros.