Anna Castillo, the Nowhere star who keeps asking to go back to small films

Anna Castillo

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

Born	October 9, 1993 Barcelona, Spain
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Nowhere, More the Merrier, La Llamada
Awards	Goya · 2 Feroz · Gaudí · Actors and Actresses Union · Sant Jordi

For most of Nowhere, Anna Castillo shares the frame with almost nothing: a steel shipping container adrift at sea, the water finding its way in, and a baby who arrives at the worst possible moment. More people pressed play on that performance than on any other non-English title Netflix released that year, and her director, Albert Pintó, called her “our female Tom Hanks, our Meryl Streep“. The actress who carried the film almost alone describes her career in smaller terms. She has said she would love to go back to independent cinema, and that between jobs she still catches herself wondering whether audiences have stopped liking her.

That pull between the mass audience and the modest, chosen project runs through a career that started a long way from the big screen. Anna Castillo Ferré grew up in Barcelona, the city where she was born, the daughter of a salesman and a teacher. She began acting classes at seven, and at twelve she joined the singing and dancing troupe attached to the children’s programming of Catalan public television, staying with its youth output into her late teens. Small parts in national series followed, among them Doctor Mateo, along with a first feature, Blog.

Theatre gave her the rest of her training. Still in her teens, having been born in October 1993, she played Alma in Nacho Cano’s musical A, and for several seasons she was Susana in La llamada, the stage musical by Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo set in a Catholic summer camp. At the same time she was working through the grind of daily television: in Amar es para siempre, Antena 3’s long-running period soap, she played Dorita Pastor, a poor orphan, across hundreds of episodes. That part made her face familiar to daytime audiences years before film critics knew her name.

The door opened with Icíar Bollaín. In El olivo Castillo played Alma, a young woman who sets out across Europe to recover the ancient olive tree her family sold, convinced it is the only thing that can bring her grandfather back from his silence. It was her first leading role in cinema, and it won her the Goya for Best New Actress in 2017. The same stretch brought the role of Belén de Lucas in Ambrossi and Calvo’s Paquita Salas, and the film version of La llamada, in which she took Susana from the stage to the screen alongside Macarena García and Belén Cuesta and earned a Goya nomination for Best Supporting Actress.

What followed showed that the comic timing was only one register. In Celia Rico’s Viaje al cuarto de una madre she played Leonor, a daughter who cannot find the moment to leave home, opposite Lola Dueñas, and the restraint of the performance brought her the Feroz and Gaudí awards for supporting actress plus a second Goya nomination. In Paco León’s black-and-white series Arde Madrid, set around Ava Gardner’s years in the Spanish capital, she played Pilar and collected a second Feroz, for series, and an Actors and Actresses Union award. La vida era eso, Adú and Mediterráneo came next, and Jaime Rosales gave her the lead in Girasoles silvestres, which brought her first Goya nomination for Best Actress and the Sant Jordi award.

Then came the streaming year. Nowhere, which Netflix released in September 2023, cast her as Mia, a heavily pregnant woman fleeing on a cargo ship who ends up alone in a container in open water. Within weeks Variety reported that it had become the most viewed non-English title on Netflix in 2023, with 77.9 million views. The same year she led Un cuento perfecto, a romantic comedy series for the same platform, on whose set she met the actor Álvaro Mel, now her partner.

The numbers and the reviews did not line up. Critics were divided on Nowhere: The New York Times found it cheap-looking and driven by coincidence, and most notices that faulted the script singled out Castillo as the reason to keep watching. Her award record has a similar shape. Her only Goya so far is the newcomer prize, won with her first lead, out of four nominations, and the wider audiences of recent years have come through comedies, thrillers and series rather than the auteur dramas that first defined her. Visibility has had a price of its own. After Nowhere she told the newspaper Ara that it had hurt her to feel “dehumanised” by talk about her private life, and that she had decided, for the sake of her mental health, not to discuss it.

Her recent work leans on that comic register without giving up the bite. In Su majestad, created by Borja Cobeaga and Diego San José for Prime Video and released in February 2025, she plays Pilar, a princess forced to take on the duties of the monarchy after her father’s scandal. She has defended the series as satire that exposes privilege without moralising, and it brought her a Feroz nomination for lead actress in a series. Around it came Rodrigo Cortés’s Escape, in which she plays the sister of Mario Casas‘s character, and the Catalan-language Wolfgang (Extraordinari), directed by Javier Ruiz Caldera.

The past year has been her busiest. Mi querida señorita, Fernando González Molina’s new version of the 1972 Jaime de Armiñán film, produced by Ambrossi and Calvo’s company, premiered at the Málaga festival in March 2026 and reached Netflix in May. Castillo plays Isabel, the woman the protagonist Adela, played by newcomer Elisabeth Martínez, falls in love with. In May she also opened Se tiene que morir mucha gente on Movistar Plus+, the series Victoria Martín adapted from her own novel, in which Castillo plays Bárbara, stuck in a job she hates, leaning on tranquillisers and sharing a flat with Macarena García’s Maca. The show competed at Canneseries and was renewed for a second season after averaging more than half a million viewers.

Castillo keeps the details of her private life at a distance, though she has spoken publicly about her sexuality. In an April 2026 interview on the Catalan programme L’Eclipsi she said she identifies as bisexual and had never described herself as a lesbian, a label that people had simply assumed.

The next confirmed steps are both second seasons. Su majestad finished shooting its new episodes in April 2026, and Se tiene que morir mucha gente is due to return in 2027. Whether the independent film she says she misses arrives in between is the open question of a career that has already shown it can hold a global audience with almost nothing else on screen.