Mina El Hammani

The asphalt of Madrid and her first casting calls

Mina El Hammani was born in Madrid in 1993. Her parents arrived from Morocco years before she decided her future lay on stage. At sixteen, she was already looking for auditions while balancing her studies with acting training.

It was not a bed of roses.

In 2014, she landed her first credited role in the series Centro médico. It was a brief appearance, but it helped casting directors start to notice that her gaze worked on screen without the need for big dialogue.

Then came El Príncipe. She played Nur for 2015 and 2016. That shoot in Ceuta gave her the experience she needed to understand how the television industry works in prime time. She quickly learned to move among large-format cameras.

The uniform that broke the bank

The call for Élite in 2018 radically changed her bank account and her anonymity. She played Nadia Shana for three full seasons. The character wore a hijab and faced prejudice at an upper-class school in Madrid.

The series premiered simultaneously in more than 190 countries. Mina went from having a few thousand followers to over six million on social media in just a few months. And that kind of exposure is often hard to manage for someone who only wanted to act.

But she decided to leave fiction in 2020. She didn't want to stretch out a forced teenage act when she was already twenty-seven. She understood that media noise could devour her career if she didn't set clear limits.

She was looking for creative quiet.

The shelter of shadows and directing

In 2021, she joined the cast of El Internado: Las Cumbres. There, she traded the luxury boarding school for a dark monastery surrounded by forests. She played Elvira, a science teacher with too many secrets, which allowed her to explore a much more mature range.

That same year, she shot Operación Marea Negra. The Amazon Prime Video production allowed her to move away from high school dramas and into a pure narcotics thriller. She rehearsed for weeks to capture the exact tone of a woman trapped in a hostile, cold environment.

In 2022, she returned to the roots of her craft with theater. She took part in Ladies Football Club, a play directed by Sergio Peris-Mencheta. It was an exhausting physical challenge about the pioneers of women's football in England during World War I.

Mina El Hammani founded her own production company, Quiet Productions, to create the stories that weren't coming to her by mail. In 2023, she directed her first short film, titled 30 Seconds. It was a personal bet, fully funded with her own savings.

And the gamble paid off.

In 2024, she appeared in the film La infiltrada, a feature based on real events about the fight against terrorism. She played a key supporting role under the direction of Arantxa Echevarría. The film had a budget of five million euros and was shot mostly on location in San Sebastián.