Jaime Lorente

The Red Monkey Outburst

Jaime Lorente is not a lab-made product from Madrid. He was born in Murcia in 1991 and was honed at the Advanced School of Dramatic Arts in his hometown long before any algorithm knew his name. His training is purely theatrical, and it shows in the way he plants his feet on set.

In 2017, his life changed when he put on Dalí's mask in Money Heist. The role of Denver brought him international fame that was hard to handle for a 25-year-old. But few people know that his iconic laugh, which went around the world, was a deliberate technical construction meant to hide the character's insecurities.

And the gamble paid off.

That same year, he followed up with the heist-gang hit Élite, where he played Nano during the first two seasons. It was a period of intense media exposure that Lorente navigated by turning to writing. In 2019, he published his first poetry book, titled A propósito de tu boca, a work he wrote over many years that reveals a far more vulnerable side than the action roles he's known for.

The Risk of the Crown and the Whip

Many actors would have been content with the tough-guy-from-the-neighborhood role, but he chose projects with greater historical weight. In 2020, he took on the challenge of starring in El Cid for Amazon Prime Video. He had to learn to handle a sword and ride horseback in armor weighing more than twenty kilos during grueling shoots on location in Soria and Burgos.

The industry was watching him closely.

But the real change of direction came in 2023 with the series Cristo y Rey. Playing the animal trainer Ángel Cristo took a considerable physical and mental toll because of the character's darkness and the complexity of the circus scenes. Lorente shot with real animals and immersed himself in the aesthetics of 1980s Spain to portray the decline of a public figure consumed by his own demons.

He has also sought out stories with different textures on the big screen. He appeared in Everybody Knows in 2018, directed by Oscar winner Asghar Farhadi, and shared the screen with Penélope Cruz. Later, in 2022, he starred in 42 Seconds, a film that tells the epic story of the Spanish water polo team at the 92 Barcelona Olympics.

Production and Asphalt

Lorente has branched out into urban music with several singles released under his own label. He isn't chasing easy applause from the charts; he's after a creative outlet that film sometimes denies him through its long waiting periods. In 2024, he premiered Disco, Ibiza, Locomía, in which he plays Xavi Font in a production that digs into the inner workings of the Spanish music industry at the end of the last century.

His pace of work hasn't slowed in recent years. In March 2024, he hit screens with Mano de hierro, a thriller about drug trafficking in the port of Barcelona directed by Lluís Quílez. In this production, he plays Néstor, a character who brings him back to the crime thriller genre, but from a much more mature and restrained perspective.

Filming for this series took place at various port locations in Catalonia during the winter of 2023, with a high-level technical budget for the maritime action sequences.