Peter Lanzani

Juan Pedro Lanzani played fly-half for Asociación Alumni and dreamed of joining the Argentina national rugby team. A photo shoot for a children's clothing brand in 2004 derailed his father's plans.

Cris Morena saw those catalog photos and put a camera in front of him. In 2006 he made his television debut in Chiquititas sin fin, but the real commercial explosion came a year later with Casi Ángeles. That meant four seasons on air, international tours with the band Teen Angels, and a collective hysteria that was hard to process at seventeen.

He could have gotten stuck in that gilded cage.

Most of his fellow cast members were either devoured by the format itself or typecast in cheap, fast-paced soap operas. Lanzani chose to cut ties before turning twenty-five.

The Leap Into the Void at San Isidro

In 2014, he made a decision that baffled his agents. He agreed to star in the stage play Equus at the Teatro Lola Membrives in Buenos Aires, performing full nudity onstage and a dense text about madness and youthful trauma.

And the gamble paid off.

Pablo Trapero was looking for the eldest son of Arquímedes Puccio for his next film, and he saw in that square-jawed young man the exact mix of fragility and sinister complicity. In 2015, El clan hit theaters. Lanzani had to add several kilos of muscle to play Alejandro Puccio, the rugby player who helped his father kidnap acquaintances in the basement of their family home.

The feature film swept the Argentine box office with more than 2.6 million moviegoers and won the Silver Lion for Best Director at the Venice Film Festival. That role instantly erased any trace of harmless teen idol.

So he decided to dive headfirst into the mud.

From the Courtroom to the Ortega Prisons

Argentine television called him back, but under different rules. In 2017 he headed the series A Rooster for Asclepius alongside Luis Brandoni, where he learned to handle fighting roosters and to master the slang of the Buenos Aires conurbation underworld over two seasons directed by Bruno Stagnaro.

A year later, Sebastián Ortega put him inside the pavilions of El marginal. His character, nicknamed Pantera, had no conventional dialogue. He communicated through growls, a hunched posture and physical violence in the yards of San Onofre. At the same time, he shot El Ángel under director Luis Ortega, playing the first criminal partner of Carlos Robledo Puch.

In 2022 came his work with the greatest international reach. Santiago Mitre cast him as Deputy Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo in Argentina, 1985, carrying the story's dramatic weight alongside Ricardo Darín.

The film won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film and earned an Oscar nomination in 2023. To prepare the scenes of the trial of the military juntas, Lanzani spent weeks reviewing archival footage from the Comodoro Py courthouses, searching for the exact mix of naivety and outrage the lawyer showed in the real hearing.

No one ever associated him with a manufactured product again.

Behind the Viewfinder

Crossing over to the other side of the camera was no whim. In 2023, he announced the development of his first feature film as director and lead actor, focused on the formative years of Luca Prodan before he founded the band Sumo.

To raise the funding, he teamed up with Martín Fisner as co-director and secured the backing of Armando Bó and Luis Ortega as executive producers. He co-wrote the screenplay with journalists Rodolfo Palacios and Sergio Olguín.

In December 2025, the first camera tests for the project, titled Viejos vinagres, leaked out, showing Lanzani with a buzz cut and the rumpled clothes the Italian musician wore when he arrived in South America.

The production plan set its locations in Rome, London and the Buenos Aires province town of Hurlingham, with a tight schedule of sixty-five shooting days on 35-millimeter film.