Martina García

The shower water ran scalding hot, and the pipes groaned in that cold mansion on the outskirts of Bogotá. Martina García stepped into the skin of Fabiana without suspecting she would spend weeks staring into a spy's mirror while Spanish box office learned her name.

That film was The Hidden Face in 2011. Almost nobody in the Gran Vía cinemas remembered that this petite actress with the hard gaze had more than ten years of television work in her home country behind her.

No one saw it coming.

Her breakthrough in European auteur cinema was no stroke of luck in a mass audition. At fourteen, she made her debut in the telenovela La guerra de las rosas, and soon after she realized that local fame was a dead end if her goal was to hold a cinematic close-up without resorting to the easy trick of the quick tear.

So she packed her bags.

From Bogotá Sets to European Stages

In London, she attended the Central School of Speech and Drama before settling in Madrid to train intensively at Juan Carlos Corazza's school. That visceral working method fundamentally changed the way she understood silence in front of the camera, far from the automatic habits of commercial TV fiction.

Director Sergio Cabrera saw that inner intensity and gave her the role of Quica in Losing is a matter of method in 2004. The actress was twenty-two and took on the dramatic weight of a underage prostitute caught up in a brutal political crime.

Three years later, Satanás came out under the direction of Andrés Baiz. The film recreated the massacre at the Pozzetto restaurant in Bogotá in 1986, and García played Natalia, a university student whose on-screen murder shocked Colombian cinemas with its physical bluntness.

And the gamble paid off.

Locked Behind the Mirror

In 2009, Ecuadorian director Sebastián Cordero cast her to star in Rabia alongside Mexican actor Gustavo Sánchez Parra. The film competed successfully at the Málaga Film Festival, winning the Golden Biznaga, and put her name on the radar of the most daring Spanish directors.

Agustí Vila cast her right away in the ensemble cast of La mosquitera in 2010, sharing scenes with Emma Suárez and Geraldine Chaplin. That same year, Alejandro González Iñárritu gave her a brief appearance in Biutiful alongside Javier Bardem.

But the massive breakthrough came when Andrés Baiz called her back to lock her in a chalet with a secret passageway. In The Hidden Face, she headlined alongside Quim Gutiérrez and Clara Lago in a psychological thriller that earned more than six million dollars at the international box office and led to several adaptations in Asian markets.

Her character avoided the usual mold of the naive lover. Fabiana was a woman of humble origins, willing to hesitate at the lock of a bunker rather than lose a newly discovered status.

From the Private Bunker to Global Drug Trafficking

In 2013, American television called on her for the third season of the espionage drama Homeland. She shot in Puerto Rico as Esme, the daughter of the crime boss who controlled the rundown tower in Caracas where Nicholas Brody was hiding.

Three years later, she joined the second season of Narcos on Netflix, playing Maritza Rincón. She played a single mother suffocated by the threats of the Medellín cartel, a civilian role that avoided the usual underworld clichés and involved a seven-week shoot on real locations in Colombia with no stunt doubles for the chase scenes.

In 2019, she shot the French production The Best Is Yet to Come, and in 2022 she made appearances in the anthology series It Wasn't My Fault: Colombia and the French-language series Las cosas que no nos dijimos. In 2024, she took part in the Spanish comedy Hotel Bitcoin, and in 2025 she premiered the drama Forastera, the debut feature of director Lucía Aleñar Iglesias, presented at the Critics' Week of the Cannes Film Festival.

The boom microphone on that Mallorca production picked up García's voice in direct sound, and the production company decided not to dub her takes in the mixing studio.