Santiago Segura

Santiago Segura financed his first short films by appearing as a contestant on public television. He showed up on the set of No te rías que es peor or Si lo sé no vengo wearing big glasses and messy hair, answered questions and collected cash prizes, which he immediately spent on 16-millimeter film canisters. He studied Fine Arts in Madrid while selling comic books at El Rastro and dubbing pornographic films to pay the rent.

That constant need for cash shaped a craftsman who never depended on the favor of cultural institutions. In 1993 he won his first Goya Award for the short Perturbado. Shortly after, Álex de la Iglesia offered him the role of José María, the satanic clerk at a Madrid record store, in El día de la bestia.

No one imagined what he was keeping in his desk drawer.

For years he wrote the story of a macho, racist former police officer and Atlético de Madrid fan who eats leftovers in a filthy apartment. Traditional production companies tossed the script in the trash, considering it too dirty for the Spanish box office. So he founded Amiguetes Entertainment to control every peseta of the production and keep the rights to the character.

In 1998, he released Torrente, el brazo tonto de la ley on a modest budget of 1.7 million euros. The film grossed more than 10 million euros and drew three million moviegoers to theaters in a single summer.

The business of incorrectness

Segura was among the first to discover the power of aggressive self-promotion on television. He roamed the general-interest channels wearing T-shirts printed with his character's face, and forced distributors to negotiate theater screenings on terms that until then only the major American studios could dictate.

In 2001, Torrente 2: Misión en Marbella arrived and shattered every known record, pulling in more than 22 million euros at the box office. Its formula mixed traditional Spanish humor with action sequences shot with technical precision, plus cameos by singers, soccer players and popular figures from the gossip press.

And the machine kept rolling.

He directed Torrente 3: El protector in 2005 and experimented with stereoscopic cameras to shoot Torrente 4: Lethal Crisis in 3D in 2011. Three years later, he cast Alec Baldwin for Torrente 5: Operación Eurovegas. But audiences started to show fatigue with the character's decline, and production costs were climbing without guaranteeing the same profit margins.

The industrial reinvention for family audiences

Rather than relying on crude humor, the director looked to foreign markets and bought the adaptation rights to an Argentine comedy titled Mamá se fue de viaje. He turned the original material into a satire about modern fatherhood and took on the lead role surrounded by an ensemble cast of children.

In 2019, he released Padre no hay más que uno and grossed 14 million euros by turning movie theaters into a summer refuge for entire families with air conditioning. When the pandemic paralyzed the film business in 2020, he unexpectedly kept the release of Padre no hay más que uno 2: La llegada de la suegra on schedule and saved the exhibition circuit's finances with nearly 13 million euros in a summer with little international competition.

Audiences bought tickets in droves.

Realizing that kids drag their parents and grandparents to the box office, he set up an almost industrial, assembly-line production system. He alternated the main franchise with the ¡A todo tren! film series and went on to release Father There is Only One 4 in 2024 and Padre no hay más que uno 5: Nido repleto in 2025.

On his shoots, he always keeps the same trusted crew and schedules strict seven-week filming plans. In 2026 he began development of Torrente for President with a fixed budget of five million euros, funded entirely through pre-sales of television rights and private distribution deals, without applying for advance grants from the ICAA.