Diego Peretti, the Argentine actor who quit psychiatry and never left the couch

Diego Peretti

Photo: Prensa TV Pública / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	February 10, 1963 Buenos Aires, Argentina
Occupation	Actor
Known for	The Heist of the Century, On Probation, Super Crazy
Awards	3 Premio Martín Fierro · 2 Premio Cóndor de Plata · Premio ACE · Premio Konex

In Therapy Done Right, the new Netflix film directed by Hernán Goldfrid, Ricardo Darín plays a psychoanalyst who has stopped believing in the rules of his own profession. Diego Peretti plays the man across the room from him: a novelist who cannot write a line and drinks to fill the silence. The casting carries a private joke. Peretti trained as a psychiatrist and practised before acting swallowed his life, and he has spent a good part of his screen career on the listening side of the consultation, as the psychologist of On Probation, the psychiatrist of Locas de amor and the therapist who carried En terapia for three seasons. Now the man who once listened for a living is the one who has to talk.

That reversal says more about him than any list of credits. Peretti has built the most recognisable neurotic in Argentine film and television out of a clinician’s patience: the pause before the answer, the face that registers a lie a second before the other character notices it has been caught.

He grew up in Constitución, in central Buenos Aires, the son of an Italian immigrant who taught physics and mathematics and a Madrid-born mother who sold clothes. He was born there on February 10, 1963, went through the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires and, on his parents’ advice, studied medicine at the University of Buenos Aires before specialising in psychiatry. Acting began as a hobby. In his second year of university he signed up for classes with the teacher Raúl Serrano, and during his residency at the Hospital Castex he was already appearing on stage in small productions such as Angelito and Bar Ada.

Television forced the choice. After a first role in the series Zona de riesgo in 1993, he was cast as “Tarta” in the police comedy Poliladrón, and during its second season he left psychiatry for good. Sergio Renán gave him his first film, El sueño de los héroes, in 1997, and in 2001 the anthology series Culpables brought him his first Martín Fierro award for best actor in a miniseries.

The turn came with Los simuladores, the Damián Szifron series that premiered in 2002 and followed four men who fix other people’s problems through elaborate cons. Peretti played Emilio Ravenna, the team’s master of disguise, and also contributed to the scripts; a decade later the Konex Foundation gave him a merit diploma as one of Argentina’s television screenwriters of the 2000s. Szifron cast him again in On Probation in 2005, pairing him with Luis Luque as a Jewish psychologist dragged into a police case, a year after Juan Taratuto’s No sos vos, soy yo had made him a romantic-comedy lead as a surgeon abandoned by his wife.

The rest of the decade widened the range. In The Signal, the noir that Ricardo Darín co-directed with Martín Hodara in 2007, he won the Cóndor de Plata for best supporting actor. Goldfrid directed him opposite Natalia Oreiro in Música en espera in 2009. Then came the role that closed the circle with his first profession: from 2012 to 2014 he played the psychologist Guillermo Montes in En terapia, the Argentine version of the Israeli format also adapted in the United States as In Treatment, and won the Martín Fierro in 2013 and again in 2014. In 2013 he also led Taratuto’s La reconstrucción, which earned him the Cóndor de Plata for best actor and the best-actor prize at the Havana film festival, and played the father in Lucía Puenzo’s The German Doctor, again with Oreiro. On stage, La chica del adiós with Paola Krum brought him the ACE award for best leading actor in a comedy in 2015.

The easy version of Peretti is the likeable wreck, and he has sold that version often. A run of family comedies in the 2010s, from Sin hijos to Mamá se fue de viaje and Re loca, in which he once again played a psychiatrist, asked him to repeat the anxious middle-class father rather than examine him. The more interesting work came when he was cast against his own charm. In The Heist of the Century, Ariel Winograd’s 2020 film about the real 2006 robbery of a Banco Río branch in Acassuso, he played Fernando Araujo, the man who planned it, and earned another Cóndor nomination. In The Kingdom, the Netflix series created by Claudia Piñeiro and Marcelo Piñeyro, he played Emilio Vázquez Pena, an evangelical pastor who turns faith into a machine for power, across two seasons in 2021 and 2023. The warmth that made him a comedy star became something unsettling in that role, and it remains the best argument that his range has been undersold.

His most recent work pushes further away from the safe choice. Death of a Comedian, released in Argentine cinemas in November 2025 after screening in the Latin American competition at the Mar del Plata festival, is his debut as a director, co-directed with Javier Beltramino, written by him and starring him as Juan Debré, a famous actor who plays a hero on screen and behaves badly off it. The film was financed by 10,190 small producers through Hernán Casciari’s Orsai Audiovisual, and reviews described it as a risky, uneven personal project from an actor who could have taken the easier road. In Juan Cabral’s Risa and the Wind Phone, shot in Ushuaia and released in cinemas in April 2026 before reaching Netflix in June, he plays Esteban, a depressed, lonely neighbour who ends up looking after a ten-year-old girl, alongside Cazzu in her film debut and Joaquín Furriel. Onstage he has been starring with Federico D’Elía in El jefe del jefe, an adaptation of Lars von Trier’s office comedy, at Paseo La Plaza in Buenos Aires; a scheduled angioplasty in April 2026 paused the run only briefly.

Therapy Done Right, written by Emanuel Diez and produced by Darín’s company Kenya Films, had its world premiere at the San Sebastián festival on September 22, 2026, and arrives on Netflix on October 16, 2026. It reunites Peretti with Darín nineteen years after The Signal and with Goldfrid seventeen years after Música en espera. For an actor who once sat in the other chair, the film is an invitation to show the audience what he learned there, this time from the couch.