Manuela Velasco

The Roar of a Shoulder-Mounted Camera

Manuela Velasco is not an actress of the typical Method school. In 1987, she appeared in La ley del deseo under the direction of Pedro Almodóvar when she was barely twelve years old. She played the daughter of Rossy de Palma, and while that could have been an anecdotal debut, it marked the start of an unusual relationship with the camera's lens.

For a long time, the public associated her with music and pure entertainment. She hosted shows on Los 40 Principales and Canal+ during the nineties because she needed to work, and television offered a security that film systematically denied her.

The industry saw her as a friendly face who hosted music videos.

In 2007, everything changed with [REC]. Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza were looking for someone who could handle the real improvisation of a TV news report, and she was the perfect candidate. She played Ángela Vidal, and the shoot demanded constant physical effort that ended up earning her the Goya for Best New Actress in 2008.

That horror film grossed more than 30 million dollars worldwide. But what mattered most wasn't the box office; it was how Velasco made viewers forget they were watching fiction. And the gamble paid off.

From Horror to Fashion Galleries

After the roar of chainsaws came the calm of daily series and major period productions. In 2014, she joined the cast of Velvet to bring Cristina Otegui to life. There, she showed she could carry long-running characters across several seasons without losing dramatic momentum.

She isn't intimidated by the marathon shoots typical of mass-appeal series. Between 2020 and 2021, she was part of Amar es para siempre, where she played Maica Galán. It was a period of intense daily work that coincided with a moment of transformation in Spanish fiction.

Theater has been her other great safe haven.

In 2010, she starred in All My Sons by Arthur Miller, directed by Claudio Tolcachir. The play stayed on the boards with an average occupancy above 85% in its first weeks of performances in Madrid. Even so, the stage didn't pull her away from genre television.

A Present Built on Consistency

In 2022, she took part in the series Express for a streaming platform. The project explored the concept of express kidnappings and allowed her to work in a drier, more direct register. Her career has since followed a steady path, untethered from the passing trends of critics.

In 2024, her role in Valle Salvaje marked a return to high-rating formats on public television. Filming this production around Segovia involved more than ten hours a day of technical and artistic work to meet the network's delivery deadlines.

The production of this series relies on more than sixty professionals for each outdoor filming unit.