Matias Varela

Matias Varela carried bags of cement on construction sites in Stockholm before film pulled him off the scaffolding. It was not an early calling of the kind forged in drama schools. His parents arrived in Sweden from Galicia in the 1970s seeking a future that ultimately took root in the Södermalm neighborhood. There he grew up speaking Spanish at home and Swedish in the street, while watching his childhood best friend, Gustaf Skarsgård, already step onto stages across half the country.

The year 2010 changed his luck with the release of Snabba Cash. He played Jorge Salinas Barrio, and suddenly his face was on billboards all over Scandinavia. The film was not only a local box office hit but also served as a showcase of new talent for casting directors in Los Angeles.

But the money did not arrive all at once.

During her first months of fame, she still needed temporary jobs to pay the rent in one of Europe's most expensive cities. Varela never hid that stage of his life because he sees the craft as physical work where exhaustion is just another tool. That natural toughness is precisely what caught the attention of the American industry.

The Asphalt of Stockholm and the Infiltration of Cali

In 2017 he got the chance to step into the shoes of Jorge Salcedo for the third season of Narcos. It was a complex shoot in Colombia where he had to handle an accent that wasn't his own but felt familiar because of his roots. The character was the head of security for the Cali cartel, and Varela gave him a chilling, frozen gestural presence that worked through pure restraint.

And the gamble paid off.

International critics took notice of this Swedish actor who spoke Spanish with surgical precision. His performance avoided the usual theatrics of television villains, focusing instead on the inner fear of a man caught between two fires. After that project, offers stopped being local and became global.

In 2020, he traveled to the deserts of South Africa to shoot Raised by Wolves under the supervision of Ridley Scott. Playing Lucius in a science fiction production of that caliber required him to work with prosthetics and in extreme weather conditions. But for someone who had spent winters working construction in Sweden, the desert heat was a minor problem.

Shoots between mines and Canary Islands borders

Varela returned to the Spanish market in 2021 to join the second season of the series Hierro. In the Canary Islands, he played a shady guy who fit perfectly with the production's dry, volcanic landscape. His ability to switch between languages without visible effort lets him work in three different markets without losing his identity.

Because language, for him, is just a technical tool.

In 2023 he starred in Avgrunden, known internationally as The Abyss, a disaster film shot in the real mines of the city of Kiruna. The shoot took place hundreds of meters underground in narrow tunnels that tested the claustrophobia of the crew. The production was after a gritty realism that the actor defended with his usual direct style and no unnecessary frills.

The distribution deal for that film with streaming platforms ensured that his work was seen in more than 190 countries simultaneously. The final budget of the movie exceeded nine million euros, and much of that investment went into practical effects to recreate the collapse of the world's largest mining town.