Ricardo Abarca

From Pop Stages to the Mud of the Streets

In 2002, Ricardo Abarca was part of M5. He was a teenager in a Mexican boy band that filled stadiums and sold platinum records, but his mind was already on film sets. That musical phase was just intensive training for what would come next in Colombian television.

Music was his first school.

His arrival on the series Isa TK+ in 2009 marked a necessary change of register. He played Sebastián Lorenzo and moved to Bogotá to shoot for months on a grueling production schedule. It was there that he understood his career would depend not on his voice but on his ability to endure fourteen-hour days in front of the camera.

But the real turning point came when Fox set his sights on him for a project that blended magical realism and the underworld. In 2013, he slipped into Hache's clothes in Cumbia Ninja, and overnight his success became continental.

And the gamble paid off.

That series, shot in the neighborhoods of Bogotá, demanded constant physical effort. Abarca had to learn martial arts and maintain a training discipline that moved him permanently away from the youth idol image of his early years. The production ran until 2015 and drew millions of viewers across Latin America.

The box office phenomenon and the change of tone

Commercial film gave him the definitive push.

In 2016, he starred in ¿Qué culpa tiene el niño? alongside Karla Souza. The film became an absolute phenomenon in Mexico and grossed more than 14 million dollars in its first weeks. Ricardo played Renato, and his portrayal of an immature young man who must face fatherhood connected with a mass audience that had previously only seen him on cable channels.

From then on, his offers became more varied. He shot El que busca encuentra in 2017 and appeared in Miss Bala in 2019 under the direction of Catherine Hardwicke. On this latter film, he shared the set with Gina Rodriguez and explored action cinema on a 15 million dollar budget financed by Sony Pictures.

Not everything was an immediate commercial success. Between large-scale shoots, he sought smaller projects to refine his acting technique. Because for Abarca, the key has always been to keep working far from the spotlight of Mexican gossip press.

Expanding into the Anglo-American market

In 2022, he starred in El Repatriado for the Disney Plus platform. The story of a Mexican boxer raised in the United States who is deported forced him to work on a specific accent and to climb into the ring convincingly. It was a grueling shoot, filmed entirely in Mexico City with an aesthetic close to a documentary.

His professional maturity came with roles that demanded less makeup and more restraint. In 2023, he took part in the Mexican version of the series El colapso, where social chaos is told through highly complex technical long takes. Projects like this allowed him to move away from the conventional romantic comedies that dominated his filmography for five years.

For 2025, his name is linked to the international production Welcome to Derry. It is the prequel to It, developed by HBO, in which the actor joins a Hollywood production structure with first-class visual effects standards. Filming for the series took place mainly on locations in Ontario during 2024.

The HBO production used large-format cameras and a technical crew of more than two hundred people per shooting unit.