Natalia de Molina

At just twenty-five, she took the stage to collect her second Goya amid the disbelief of the veterans in the room. Penélope Cruz had needed to reach her thirties to match such a record. Natalia de Molina signed it in just over seven hundred days with a suffocating drama about evictions that cost barely three hundred thousand euros funded through crowdfunding.

Before that whirlwind, she worked pouring drinks in taverns in central Madrid to pay for a tiny room in Lavapiés while collecting rejections at casting calls. David Trueba pulled her out of that cycle in 2013 by entrusting her with the role of Belén in Live Is Easy with Eyes Closed, sharing a van with Javier Cámara. That role earned her first Goya for Best New Actress in 2014.

Nobody in the industry saw it coming.

But instead of signing up for lightweight comedy contracts with mainstream networks, she chose to immerse herself in independent projects with debut directors. She understood very early that quick TV fame often comes with creative costs that are far too high.

The social mud and the refusal to be a mere extra

In 2015, Juan Miguel del Castillo handed her the script for Techo y comida. The shoot was a logistical ordeal in Jerez de la Frontera, where she played an unemployed mother on the brink of the harshest housing exclusion.

She lost eight kilos through a strict diet so that Rocío's hunger wouldn't be a prop trick. She also spent two months living with families from soup kitchens to strip any hint of tearjerker melodrama from her gestures. In 2016, that physical restraint won her the Best Actress statuette over Juliette Binoche and Inma Cuesta, a earthquake that upended the academy members' usual voting patterns.

And the industry had to accept it.

So she built a filmography with no safety net. She jumped into sex comedy with Kiki, Love to Love (2016) alongside Paco León, and plunged into the murky abyss of Who Will Sing for You (2018) under the direction of Carlos Vermut, playing a violent, dependent daughter who delivered her scenes at the top of her lungs in suffocating spaces.

In 2020, Pilar Palomero cast her as Adela in Las niñas. The widowed seamstress from Zaragoza in 1992 earned her another Goya nomination for Best Supporting Actress, thanks to a performance built on evasive glances and kitchen silences.

Asphalt, Physical Wounds, and Technical Detours

By the 2020s, genre directors had discovered that her petite frame hid an unusual physical power. In 2023, Miguel Ángel Vivas put her in the vest of a riot police officer in Asedio, where she carried ninety minutes of relentless chase alone through the passages of an abandoned residential block. She finished the four weeks of night shooting with bruised ribs and tendinitis in both arms.

Zero concessions to rest.

In 2024, she moved between opposite registers without changing her approach. She lent her voice to the courtroom testimonies in the documentary No estás sola: La lucha contra La Manada, shot the biopic ¿Es el enemigo? La película de Gila, and shared the screen with Emma Suárez in the drama Desmontando un elefante, where she played a daughter consumed by her mother's alcohol addiction.

That same year she entered large-scale serial production with Mano de hierro for Netflix, taking on the role of Rocío Manchado in the criminal web of the Barcelona port. In 2025 she completely transformed herself to play Loly Álvarez in the satire Superestar, a project conceived by Nacho Vigalondo, where she changed her voice and body language to avoid a crude caricature.

In 2026, she wrapped her work on LA BOLA NEGRA, an ensemble feature directed by Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi based on texts by Federico García Lorca, shot on photochemical film with an official budget of fifteen million euros.