Martiño Rivas

Arriving in Madrid at twenty-two and seeing your face plastered across newsstands all over Spain can unsettle anyone.

The son of writer Manuel Rivas, Martiño grew up among newspaper newsrooms and the Atlantic winds of Vimianzo before stepping onto a set for the first time at thirteen in Mareas vivas, the technical training ground of Galician regional television.

That school experience helped her get familiar with floor markings and the rhythms of recording.

When she arrived in the capital, she already had a university degree in Audiovisual Communication from Santiago de Compostela and a year of acting training in London, but nothing could prepare a young actor for the collective hysteria of millions of viewers.

And the trap of the teen heartthrob was set.

From School Desks to the Mud of the Postwar Years

For seven seasons and seventy-one consecutive episodes, her daily routine was trapped between the sets of the Laguna Negra boarding school.

The actor played the long-suffering Marcos Novoa in The Boarding School while audiences devoured school mysteries, with some four million viewers glued to their screens every week.

But the leap to film came without a safety net.

In 2008, director José Luis Cuerda chose him to go up against Maribel Verdú in Los girasoles ciegos, where he played a young man hunted down in the mountains during the harshest years of Franco's regime.

That film earned him his first Goya Awards nomination as best new actor at just twenty-four years old. The label of a mere teen product began to crack among the toughest critics.

A Haven of Stage and Comedy

In 2010, Rivas rejected the easy habit of stringing together light comedies made for quick consumption.

He chose to lock himself in theater dressing rooms to build his craft live on stage.

In 2013, she took to the stage of the Centro Dramático Nacional in La monja Alférez, directed by Juan Carlos Rubio. Shortly after, she was hanging from harnesses to perform Cuestión de altura in venues on Madrid's alternative circuit, just a stone's throw from the front row.

The set allowed no tricks.

That same year, he took a supporting role in 3 bodas de más, Javier Ruiz Caldera's sharp comedy that grossed over six million euros at the box office.

Rivas displayed a dry, finely tuned comedic touch that caught off guard those who only remembered him running through dark passageways.

Physical Exposure With No Safety Net

Streaming platforms transformed production rhythms starting in 2017.

Rivas then signed on for Cable Girls, the first original fiction series Netflix produced entirely in Spain, and played the well-off Carlos Cifuentes across forty-two episodes over five seasons.

But the most awkward project of his career took a few more years to reach casting offices.

In 2023, he took on the role of Ignacio Jordà in the biographical series Nacho, a production that required him to gain seven kilos of muscle mass and shoot dozens of explicit scenes while avoiding the grotesque parody of the 1990s porn industry.

In 2026, he headed the cast of The Final Problem, a miniseries based on Arturo Pérez-Reverte's detective novel, alongside director Félix Viscarret, after finishing filming the TV drama Ella, maldita alma.

Production on this latest title suffered three consecutive weeks of delays due to rainstorms on the Cantabrian coast, and the final budget ended up 12 percent over the original allocation for the shoot.