Benny Emmanuel, the actor who couldn’t swim when Netflix cast him in a hurricane

Benny Emmanuel

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	December 17, 1996 Amatitlán, Veracruz, Mexico
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Impossible Things, Sin Nombre, La Leyenda de los Chaneques
Awards	Ariel

At the casting for his latest film, Benny Emmanuel told the producers he could swim. He could not. “I had to tell a little lie at the casting and say I could,” he admitted to the Mexican paper Récord in the week Surviving Hurricane Otis reached Netflix, a survival drama that keeps him soaked and adrift on a yacht. He had been terrified of the water, he said, and the character forced him to get over it. The fib fits a career that has rarely arrived in the expected order. Mexico’s film academy named him the breakthrough of the year for a performance he gave as a boy, in a film that had sat unreleased for eight years, and his most widely heard role is one audiences never see: the voice of a cartoon hero he has played since his teens.

Benny Emmanuel Mendoza Yirene comes from Amatitlán, in the state of Veracruz, and grew up in Mexico City, where his family moved before his first birthday. As a small boy he kept asking his parents how the children on television had got there; they took him to castings until, at seven, he won a place at the Centro de Educación Artística, Televisa’s training school and one of the country’s main nurseries of young actors. There he met Harold Azuara, who became a close friend, a castmate and, later, his partner in a comedy channel on YouTube.

The CEA fed him to television early, with small parts in the sitcoms La familia P. Luche and Vecinos, and a string of episodes of the anthology drama La rosa de Guadalupe. Born on 17 December 1996, he was fifteen when the first role that made him recognisable arrived in 2012: Roberto “Beto” Bautista, the cleverest pupil in the class, in La CQ, a Televisa youth sitcom set in a secondary school that ran for four seasons until 2014.

A more serious piece of work had already been shot and shelved. In De la infancia, directed by Carlos Carrera, he played Francisco, the eldest son of a violent father played by Damián Alcázar, a boy who escapes into play and fantasy. The film screened at the Guadalajara festival in 2010 and then stayed off cinema screens until March 2018. Producers saw it in private during those lost years, he has said, and it got him auditions.

In 2014 he also found the part that would follow him longest. He became the third actor to voice Leo San Juan, the boy hero of the animated Leyendas saga, starting with The Legend of the Guanajuato Mummies. He has voiced Leo in every feature since, as well as in a Netflix series spun off from the films.

The two halves of his career met in 2019. Gael García Bernal cast him as Cagalera in Chicuarotes, his second feature as a director: a teenager from San Gregorio Atlapulco, in Xochimilco, who goes from telling jokes for coins on city buses to planning a kidnapping with his friend Moloteco. The film opened in the Special Screenings section at Cannes in May. A month later, at the Ariel awards, Emmanuel won the prize for Best Breakthrough Performance, the first time the academy handed out a single award for the category instead of separate male and female ones. It was for De la infancia. “A lot of people thought it was for Chicuarotes,” he recalled, “when it was really for De la infancia.” Chicuarotes earned him a Best Actor nomination the following year, and Ernesto Contreras’s Impossible Things, in which he plays Miguel, a nineteen-year-old small-time drug dealer abandoned by his mother who befriends a widow played by Nora Velázquez, brought another. He lost both times. Losing, he has said, at least makes you ask what you take away from it.

Those two nominations point at the tension in his screen persona. Most of the roles that have earned him attention are poor boys trying to get out: Cagalera, Miguel and the title character of Vgly, an HBO Max series about a rapper from the Guerrero neighbourhood of Mexico City. Emmanuel defends that line of work as a corrective. “We have stigmatised the barrio,” he said when the series launched, and he wanted to show its aspirational side. But it is a narrow lane for an actor who trained in sitcom comedy and whose most widely heard performance is a voice, and he has spoken about it himself, saying the boom in Mexican productions has opened room for different kinds of characters “so they don’t typecast you.” The roles that make full use of that range have so far come mostly from television, not from the festival cinema that first took him seriously.

Streaming has kept him busy. He was Kike in the Netflix racing series Pedal to Metal in 2022, led two seasons of Vgly, the second premiering in October 2025, and joined Cecilia Suárez in Manolo Caro’s Netflix comedy Snakes and Ladders in 2025. Quién magazine put him on its list of Mexico’s most influential people in 2023.

October 2026 brought three releases in a fortnight. Ashes, Diego Luna’s adaptation of Brenda Navarro’s novel about a young woman who moves from Mexico to Spain to rejoin her mother, premiered in the Special Screenings at Cannes in May, where Emmanuel joined Luna and the cast at the screening; it opened in Spanish cinemas on 9 October. La venganza del Charro Negro, his latest outing as Leo San Juan, reached Mexican cinemas on 22 October after a premiere at the Morelia festival. A day later Netflix released Surviving Hurricane Otis, directed by Jorge Michel Grau. Emmanuel plays Wirpul, a young yacht hand promoted to captain who stays aboard his employer’s boat with Candi, the half-brother he barely speaks to, played by Kristyan Ferrer, as Otis grows into a Category 5 hurricane and strikes Acapulco on 25 October 2023. The story draws on Marlon Valdez and Jonathan “Chino”, two crewmen who survived the night on a yacht and advised the production, which filmed in Acapulco and recreated the storm with giant wind machines at Estudios Churubusco. Emmanuel described Wirpul as one of the forgotten of the disaster, someone who follows every duty of the job to the letter and lets his own life pass by unnoticed.

Next comes the Mexican release of Ashes on 5 November, ahead of its arrival on Netflix in 2027, and the drama Unos días al sol, now in post-production, in which he plays Florencio. He can swim now, he says.

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Tags: actors, Mexican cinema, Gael García Bernal, Benny Emmanuel, Kristyan Ferrer, Surviving Hurricane Otis

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