Maite Perroni, the RBD singer who says she never felt like a singer

Maite Perroni

Photo: Dulce y Picante / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	March 9, 1983 Mexico City, Mexico
Occupation	Actress and singer
Known for	An Egg Rescue, Little Eggs: A Frozen Rescue, Huevos: Little Rooster's Egg-Cellent Adventure
Awards	TVyNovelas Award, Best Young Lead Actress · TVyNovelas Award, Best Lead Actress · TVyNovelas Award, Favoritos del Publico · Premios Juventud, Favorite Actress · GQ Mexico, Actress of the Year

In a Madrid interview given while she was promoting a Spanish film, Maite Perroni said something that sits strangely beside her own sales figures: she never felt like a singer. She sang lead on RBD records that sold by the millions, played stadiums and arenas from Rio de Janeiro to New York with the band and later released a solo album that climbed high on Billboard’s Latin pop chart. Her explanation was plain. The training she had received as an actress gave her enough tools to move across several fields, and singing was one of those fields, never the identity.

That distinction, actress first and everything else as an extension of the job, explains most of the choices that look odd from outside. It explains why she kept taking telenovela leads while the band was still at its peak, and why the work that finally changed how the industry saw her was a Netflix thriller in which she had to play three women at once. It also explains, in a harder way, why she let the most lucrative reunion in Latin pop go on without her.

Mexico City is where Maite Perroni Beorlegui was born, on 9 March 1983, but Guadalajara is where she grew up: her family lived there until she was thirteen and then moved back to the capital. She is the eldest of three siblings, with two younger brothers, Adolfo and Francisco, and comes from a family of Italian descent now four generations in Mexico; the actor Pablo Perroni is her cousin. As a child she appeared in television commercials and music videos and danced on a Disney Channel programme. After secondary school she enrolled at the Centro de Educación Artística, the acting school run by Televisa, where she completed a three-year course in two and graduated in 2003. Small stage roles followed, in plays such as Las cosas simples and Los enamorados.

The call that defined the next decade came in 2004. Televisa cast her as Guadalupe “Lupita” Fernández in Rebelde, its remake of the Argentine youth hit Rebelde Way: a girl from a modest family who wins a scholarship to the elite school at the centre of the story. She was one of six leads, alongside Anahí, Dulce María, Christian Chávez, Alfonso Herrera and Christopher von Uckermann. The series ran until 2006 and filmed 440 episodes. More consequentially, the six actors were also a band.

RBD began as a marketing extension of a telenovela and grew into something larger than the show. The group’s second album, Nuestro amor, went platinum within seven hours of release and earned a Latin Grammy nomination, and in October 2006 RBD became the first Spanish-language act to headline the Maracanã stadium in Rio, in front of about 120,000 people. Across albums recorded in Spanish, Portuguese and English, the band sold more than fifteen million records. Perroni wrote “Tal vez mañana” for Empezar desde cero in 2007 and sang lead on that album’s title track. Mattel even issued Barbie dolls of the three female characters in 2007, the first modelled on Mexican performers. When the group announced its split in August 2008 and set off on a farewell tour, she missed part of it. She was already filming her first lead role.

That role was Marichuy in Cuidado con el ángel, opposite William Levy, and it won her the TVyNovelas award for best young lead actress in 2009. The same year she led Mi pecado with Eugenio Siller, and Univision began calling her the new queen of telenovelas. The leads arrived at a steady clip after that: Triunfo del amor in 2010, a remake of the Venezuelan classic Cristal and a reunion with Levy; Cachito de cielo with Pedro Fernández in 2012; La gata with Daniel Arenas in 2014, the year People en Español handed her the same royal title Univision had used five years earlier. Antes muerta que Lichita, a 2015 comedy opposite Arath de la Torre in which she played the title character, brought her the TVyNovelas award for best lead actress in 2016 and the favourite actress prize at Premios Juventud. Papá a toda madre, with Sebastián Rulli, followed in 2017.

The singing never stopped entirely, which is part of the confusion. After signing with Warner Music she released her only solo album, Eclipse de luna, in 2013. It entered the Mexican chart at number three and reached number two on Billboard’s Latin Pop Albums list, and its bachata singles, “Tú y yo” among them, led part of the Latin press to call her a bachata queen. Singles kept appearing until the end of the decade, from “Adicta” in 2016 to “Loca” with Cali y El Dandee in 2017 and “Como yo te quiero” with Alexis & Fido in 2018. By 2025 her official site was noting that she had gone more than six years without releasing new music. She also built a quieter career in dubbing, voicing the Tooth Fairy in the Latin American version of Rise of the Guardians and the character Di in the Mexican animated Huevos films.

The critical case against that body of work is easy to make, and fair as far as it goes. For more than a decade Perroni was Televisa’s most dependable heroine in a format built on repetition: the virtuous young woman, the obstacle, the long suffering, the wedding. Being crowned queen of the genre twice measured reach rather than range, and the titles said little about what she could do outside it. Her own account in that Madrid interview, given to the EFE news agency in May 2022, reads less as a denial of the critique than as a reply to it. She described closing the RBD cycle with gratitude and going back to what really excited her, which was acting, and from then on producing.

The platforms gave her the exit. In 2019 she joined El juego de las llaves, an Amazon Prime Video comedy about couples experimenting with partner-swapping, and in 2020 she starred in Herederos por accidente for Claro Video. The decisive move was Dark Desire, released by Netflix in July 2020, a thriller created by Leticia López Margalli in which Perroni plays Alma Solares, a married law professor whose affair with a younger man becomes entangled with the death of someone close to her. Its explicit scenes broke with everything the telenovela had trained her audience to expect. The second season, in February 2022, entered Netflix’s global chart for non-English series at number three with almost fifty million hours viewed in its first week, and pulled the first season back into the top ten beside it.

Triptych, which premiered on 22 February 2023 and also came from López Margalli, raised the technical stakes. Perroni plays three triplets separated at birth who discover one another as adults, and the series asked her to make each sister legible on her own and in scenes opposite herself. Netflix’s own figures put it at number one among non-English series worldwide for two consecutive weeks, and across its four weeks in the global top ten it accumulated more than 113 million hours viewed. It was the clearest evidence so far that the face Latin American viewers had followed for two decades could carry a series built for a global audience. Around the same period she worked in Spain as well, in Sin ti no puedo, a drama directed by Chus Gutiérrez, shot in Madrid and released in Spanish cinemas in June 2022.

Then the band came back, and with it the hardest decision of her career. The Soy Rebelde Tour, which opened in El Paso on 25 August 2023 and closed at Mexico City’s Estadio Azteca that December, reunited five of the six original members, with Alfonso Herrera staying out, and grossed more than 200 million dollars. Within months the money had become the problem. In May 2024 the group put its projects on hold amid a financial dispute with its former manager, Guillermo Rosas, and that June Perroni joined Christian Chávez and Christopher von Uckermann in a lawsuit filed in a California court. Her husband, the television producer Andrés Tovar, said at the time that the case was about justice rather than money. In August 2025 he wrote that Perroni loved RBD, its music and its fans, but would not take part in a project where there was abuse, theft and mistreatment, because her values stood above money even if it cost her a project she loved. Mexican press reports linked the audit to the cancellation of a planned tour documentary. Some fans of the other members criticised Tovar for airing the conflict in public; Perroni has not returned to the group.

Her own farewell to that chapter came in book form. In 2025, marking twenty years since Rebelde, she published Mi viaje como Rebelde, a photographic record of her years with the band that includes more than seventy previously unseen images.

Her private life has mostly become public on her own terms. She was in a relationship with the Chilean musician and producer Koko Stambuk from 2013 to 2020. In 2021 she began dating Tovar, whom she had known since she was young; they married in Valle de Bravo in October 2022, and their daughter, Lía, was born in May 2023. In 2016, during a trip to Israel, she chose to be baptised in the Jordan River. In June 2026, after Tovar was formally linked to criminal proceedings in Mexico City over a complaint filed by Imagen Televisión, a case he says grew out of his own civil claim for payments and rights owed for programmes he produced for the network and which carries no finding of guilt, she defended him in an interview with the magazine Quién, asking at what point defending your work and your rights becomes a crime.

The next step is the one she has been describing since that Madrid interview. In April 2025 she was cast in No Te Olvides, an original movie musical directed by Kimberly McCullough, of High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, from a script by Nerris Nevarez-Nassiri, and presented in the Mexican press as her Hollywood debut. Perroni plays Celestina, the hard-working mother of a closeted young Chicana played by Xochitl Gomez, in a story about three generations of Mexican-American women and a grandmother’s wish to see her village again before Alzheimer’s takes her memories. Production was scheduled to begin in the autumn of 2025, and no release date has been announced. It is, of all things, a musical: the genre that will once again ask the actress who never felt like a singer to sing.

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