Pedro Alonso

In the winter of 2004, Pedro Alonso was broke, out of work and physically certain that acting was wrecking his health. He had graduated from the Royal Higher School of Dramatic Art in 1992 and spent more than a decade drifting through independent theater productions such as Romeo and Juliet and collaborations with La Fura dels Baus. His calling was not paying the bills at the end of the month.

And he decided to stop.

He stepped away from the stage to start painting large-format canvases and to untangle a mind that was running at full speed. In Spain, the acting profession chews up actors without warning. When many had written off his career, the actor from Vigo got on a bus back to Galicia to rebuild his approach from the ground up.

The rural priest who saved the finances

In 2008, he signed with Galician regional television to headline Padre Casares. The premise was equal parts simple and risky: he played a young priest, fresh out of seminary, arriving at the fictional parish of Santo Antonio de Louredo. Nobody predicted a mass phenomenon.

But the costumbrist comedy smashed records on the small screen with a 36.4% audience share in its most-watched broadcast and 136 episodes in which the actor learned to measure silences in front of a fast-moving camera. That fieldwork brought back his professional momentum.

In 2011, he made his national breakthrough with Grand Hotel under the direction of Carlos Sedes. His portrayal of Diego Murquía revealed a dark side that Madrid casting directors did not know he had. He played a sleek villain with a sharp smile who used pauses as a psychological weapon against his castmates.

The Heist That Blew Up the Offices

In 2017, he shot the first batch of Money Heist for Antena 3. His character was Andrés de Fonollosa, a narcissistic robber with a terminal illness who sang traditional Italian songs while orchestrating a mass hostage situation inside the Royal Mint of Spain.

The character was supposed to die in the first season.

Free-to-air ratings dropped in the show's second season, and Antena 3 canceled the project that November. It looked like another title buried in the commercial TV archive. But Netflix's purchase of the catalog changed every rule of the industry, adding more than sixty-nine million viewers during its international launch in the weeks after release.

Fans demanded the return of the dead robber, and the writers turned to flashbacks for three more seasons. So in 2023, the franchise premiered Berlin, a spin-off focused on the character's earlier heists in Paris. The platform expanded the project into a second installment shot between Spain and France, with a technical setup that quadrupled the original budget.

The Mexican escape between paintbrushes and peyote

Far from the media noise, Alonso adopted the artistic pseudonym O’Choro to sign his paintings and published El libro de Filipo in 2020. The volume combined reflections on hypnotic regression with his own illustrations and prose pieces that puzzled fans of his mainstream series.

He had no interest in pleasing the mass audience.

In November 2024, he presented his feature directorial debut, In the Nave of Enchantment, a documentary feature co-directed with Enrique Baró Ubach that explores shamanic ceremonies and traditional medicine in Mexico. To fund it, he turned down conventional television roles in Madrid.

The film locked its edit with a final runtime of 164 minutes after four weeks in the editing room. The sound design was completed entirely with live recordings, without studio dubbing.