María Pedraza

Esteban Crespo didn't find his lead in a drama school or in a open casting call in Madrid. He found her by swiping her thumb across a cell phone screen. She was 2016, and María Pedraza spent her days locked in the classrooms of the Mariemma Professional Conservatory of Dance with her feet bandaged and a life plan that didn't include speaking a single line of dialogue.

That blind audition for Amar blew up any previous roadmap.

From Mariemma to the global spotlight

Classical ballet exacts a brutal physical toll. Pedraza had spent ten years training eight hours a day under strict discipline when an injury to her fibula abruptly halted her progress in ballet. Crespo's call came right in the middle of that professional and personal void.

In 2017, the film competed in the official section of the Málaga Film Festival. The movie divided critics, but it put her work on the radar of Madrid-based production companies.

That same year, Atresmedia hired her to play Alison Parker in Money Heist. On Spanish free-to-air television, the series had a modest run during its weekly broadcasts. But when the American company Netflix acquired the rights to its catalog at the end of 2017, the project's reach exploded across all five continents. The phenomenon added ten million followers on social media in just a few months.

The toll of fast consumption

And the industrial machinery of streaming rarely waits for anyone.

In 2018, Élite premiered. Her character anchored the mystery of the entire first season and made her the lead face of a production watched by more than twenty million households in its first four weeks. That overexposure brought contracts with high-end brands and covers in European fashion magazines.

But being typecast in high school storylines threatened to swallow any attempt to build a filmography with real dramatic weight.

So the actress looked for projects beyond the fictional classroom. In 2019, she took on the role of a young lawyer in Toy Boy, filmed on locations along the Costa del Sol. Its run on mainstream television hit very weak ratings, but its rescue on streaming platforms saved the production and secured a second season of episodes.

In 2021, she followed up with the romantic comedy Poliamor para principiantes, directed by Fernando Colomo, and the psychological horror thriller Ego. Neither title connected with audiences at the box office.

Extreme physicality and genre cinema

In 2022, director Jota Linares created a role for her that directly bridged her two worlds. In Las niñas de cristal, she played Irene, a soloist suffocated by paranoia and the physical pressure of an elite dance company. Because muscle memory doesn't disappear with a change of career. Pedraza performed all of the complex choreography on set without using body doubles, which forced the camera crew to rethink technical shots to follow her turns on stage.

That film settled old scores with her teenage years at the conservatory.

Starting in 2023, her work shifted toward action and suspense films. That year she co-starred in the science fiction production Awareness, and in 2024 she released El correo, directed by Daniel Calparsoro, sharing the screen with Luis Tosar. That same 2024, she took part in the corporate thriller Galgos and worked under Calparsoro's direction again in the miniseries Asalto al Banco Central, about the 1981 robbery in Barcelona.

In 2025, she wrapped her role in the international production Just Play Dead, a thriller directed by Martin Campbell with a $12 million budget and a shoot split between Bulgaria and Madrid.