Alexandra Jiménez went from sitcom sidekick to the lead Netflix keeps casting

Alexandra Jiménez

Photo: Pedro J Pacheco / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	January 4, 1980 Zaragoza, Spain
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Toc Toc, Tad the Lost Explorer and the Emerald Tablet, 100 Meters
Awards	Biznaga de Plata (shared) · Gaudí · Premio Simón

In Fading Grandeur, the Netflix comedy that puts her name beside Antonio de la Torre’s at the top of the cast, Alexandra Jiménez plays a millionaire businesswoman who turns up to buy a bankrupt marquis’s crumbling Madrid mansion and is not quite who she claims to be. The joke works because Spanish viewers have spent two decades watching her play one particular woman: quick, warm, a little exasperated, standing next to the man who gets the punchline. The series hands her the deception instead. Her career has been heading toward that switch for some time.

She was supposed to be a dancer. Jiménez grew up in Zaragoza and followed her sister into ballet at the María de Ávila dance school, taking much of her schooling at a distance so the training could come first. By fifteen she was dancing professionally, and she was working with the Ballet Nacional de Cuba when an injury to her right foot forced her to rethink everything. She has said acting was what she wanted even before ballet. She enrolled at the TAI arts school in Madrid and, while still a student, picked up small parts in Periodistas, Policías, en el corazón de la calle and Compañeros, plus a first film role in La fiesta.

The Telecinco family sitcom Los Serrano, which she joined in 2004, made the Zaragoza native, born on 4 January 1980, recognizable across Spain. As África Sanz, the long-suffering girlfriend of Alejo Sauras’s Raúl and best friend of Verónica Sánchez’s Eva, she began on the edge of the ensemble and finished among its leads, with a first Unión de Actores nomination along the way. When the show ended she joined La familia Mata for its final season, then carried La pecera de Eva from 2010 to 2011 as Eva Padrón, an unconventional psychologist working with teenagers at a secondary school in Zamora. That role brought a second Unión de Actores nomination and best television actress prizes from the León film and TV festival and from Cosmopolitan.

Cinema used her the same way, and used her often. Javier Ruiz Caldera cast her in Spanish Movie, a spoof of recent Spanish hits that did big business at the box office in 2009, then as Tina, the head teacher trying to keep a school haunted by five teenage ghosts open in Ghost Graduation, and again in Anacleto: agente secreto. Borja Cobeaga paired her with Unax Ugalde in No controles, Álex de la Iglesia put her in the cast of Witching & Bitching, and she starred opposite Paco León in Juana Macías’s Embarazados before León cast her in Kiki, el amor se hace. She hosted the first Feroz awards gala in 2014 and spent a season presenting El club de la comedia after Eva Hache stepped down. That same stretch included Café para llevar, a short she made with Daniel Grao that went on to win the Goya for best short film.

The trouble with being dependable in comedy is that the industry stops looking anywhere else. Jiménez’s strongest notices came from parts that were not jokes. In 100 Meters, Marcel Barrena’s drama about a man with multiple sclerosis who sets out to finish an Ironman, she played Inma, the wife of Dani Rovira‘s character, and won the Gaudí award for best supporting actress. Two years later Elena Trapé’s Distances, a small film about a group of friends whose reunion in Berlin curdles, earned her the Biznaga de Plata for best actress at the Málaga festival, shared with Valeria Bertuccelli, along with lead-actress nominations at the Gaudí, Feroz and Forqué awards. Around those two films, though, the work that kept arriving asked for the familiar version: the obsessive-compulsive Blanca in Toc Toc, Luisa Lanas opposite Rovira in the blockbuster Superlópez, then Si yo fuera rico, La ternura and Buscando a Coque. Even the prestige projects have not always known what to do with her. When Cesc Gay built 53 Sundays around her character’s point of view, the critic at Otros Cines found her occasional address to camera an arbitrary device, revisited too rarely to earn its place.

Television gave her the room that film rarely did. She led La zona on Movistar+ as Julia Martos, a military doctor in a thriller set after a nuclear accident, and earned a Feroz nomination as best lead actress in a series. She headed the TVE medical drama Hospital Valle Norte and crossed to Argentina for Atrapa a un ladrón. Then Oriol Paulo cast her as Inspector Lorena Ortiz in The Innocent, his Netflix adaptation of Harlan Coben‘s novel, opposite Mario Casas. The series reached viewers far beyond Spain and set the pattern for what came next. Back in theaters, the Nacho G. Velilla comedy Menudas piezas won her the Premio Simón for best actress from the Aragonese film academy.

Netflix has kept calling. In March 2026 she appeared in 53 Sundays, Gay’s adaptation of his own stage play, as Carol, the wife of Javier Cámara’s Julián, in a family squabble with Carmen Machi and Javier Gutiérrez over what to do about an aging father. In September came Go Team!, a black comedy directed by Diego Núñez Irigoyen in which she and Maribel Verdú lead the staff of a struggling family cheese company whose team-building retreat collapses once word of layoffs leaks out. On 23 October Netflix released Fading Grandeur, six episodes created and directed by Álvaro Fernández-Armero and Juan Cavestany, with Jiménez as Sofía Carrington, the buyer whose interest in Don Leandro’s house is as much a performance as his dignity.

Away from the set she keeps her private life largely out of view. Her partner is the actor Luis Rallo, with whom she worked on stage in José Luis Alonso de Santos’s Un pequeño juego sin consecuencias and later in Los Serrano, La pecera de Eva and Hospital Valle Norte. Their daughter was born in 2021.

Next is Proxies, Paulo’s return to Netflix, written with Guillem Clua and due to premiere worldwide on 11 December alongside Eduard Fernández, Mario Casas, Blanca Suárez and Nicolás Francella. It opens with a man walking into a police station on Christmas Eve to confess to two killings, or perhaps three. After twenty years as the person who reacts, Jiménez keeps landing in stories about people who are not what they appear to be, which is also a fair description of how Spanish cinema read her for most of that time.