Édgar Vittorino, the actor Spain turned into a hitman and Netflix turned into a Buendía

Édgar Vittorino

Photo: Programa Satélite / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	June 10, 1988 Barranquilla, Colombia
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Below Zero, Centauro
Awards	2 TVyNovelas (nomination)

There is something José Arcadio Buendía carries into every room that García Márquez described as a kind of weight: not violence exactly, but the raw fact of himself — a body too large for ordinary life, desires that bend the logic of whatever space contains him. Playing that character on the most-watched Spanish-language Netflix series of recent memory required an actor who understood desire and danger from somewhere other than technique alone. Édgar Vittorino, who had spent four years being precisely that kind of presence for Spanish prime-time television — as Freddy, the Colombian hitman in Vivir sin permiso — understood it from accumulated experience.

He was born in 1988 in Barranquilla, the Caribbean port that García Márquez’s own family left for Aracataca — the real geography behind Macondo. His DNA carries a minor version of that Colombian complexity: a maternal grandfather who emigrated from Scalea, Italy, fleeing World War II; Afro-Colombian roots on both sides of the family; the particular texture of costeño culture where these strands have been combining for generations. His father practiced medicine; his mother worked as a bacteriologist. At thirteen, a theatrical performance at his school broke something open. By fifteen, he was performing with Teatro Vivo in the streets and parks of his hometown, learning what it means to hold an audience that chose to keep walking.

What followed was methodical in the way careers rarely allow. A move to Bogotá at eighteen, a scholarship to Caracol Televisión’s acting academy under director Laura García, then years of Colombian telenovelas — the full technical range of soap opera, with its compressed timelines and impossible emotional demands. He continued training: the Susan Batson Studio in New York in 2012, then Juan Carlos Corazza’s studio in Madrid from 2016 onward, placing himself in rooms where Colombian actors rarely sat.

His first nationally recognizable role came with La selección (2013-2014), where he played Carlos Valderrama — the footballer known as El Pibe, whose improbable blond hair and precise passing style made him one of the most charged symbols in Colombian national life. Playing Valderrama was not an impersonation exercise but a problem of translation: how to render an icon who is still alive, still recognizable to an entire country, into dramatic truth rather than impression. The performance earned a TVyNovelas nomination and, more importantly, a different kind of visibility — the kind that comes from inhabiting someone a nation already has opinions about.

Madrid, when he arrived to stay in 2018, had a specific idea of what it wanted from a Colombian actor. Vivir sin permiso gave him the assignment: Freddy, a Colombian hitman working for a Galician drug lord, a villain whose job description the Spanish audience had seen versions of in countless productions. What they had not seen was this version — a Freddy whose menace was grounded in a coherent inner logic, a man doing violence because the alternatives had been removed rather than because violence was the natural register of people like him. The series ran for two seasons on Telecinco and made Vittorino a recognizable quantity in a market where Colombian actors had largely been peripheral.

The tension in his career between 2020 and 2023 is the one that defines it: as Netflix and Amazon were building Spanish-language productions at scale, Vittorino kept landing — El robo del siglo, Bajocero, Centauro (directed by Daniel Calparsoro), Desaparecidos, and then the improbable Narcosantos, a Korean Netflix production that needed a Spanish-speaking cast member and dropped him on a set where almost no one shared his language. Each project confirmed his range across formats. None of them quite dissolved the casting gravity that kept pulling him toward the same archetype — the dangerous man, the foreign threat — that his Colombian identity made convenient for European productions.

Cien años de soledad answered the question those roles had been avoiding. The Netflix adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez‘s novel — a project that generations of filmmakers had declared unfilmable, that the García Márquez estate protected for five decades before granting rights — became a cultural event before its December 2024 premiere. Vittorino’s José Arcadio is the eldest Buendía son: the one who leaves Macondo with the gypsies, returns tattooed and enormous and impossible to contain, marries Rebeca against the logic of family and God alike, and moves through the story with the force of something the world will eventually have to process rather than understand. In a production where the acting needed to sustain the novel’s mythic register without tipping into parody, he held that register from inside.

The critical conversation around Cien años de soledad tended toward the show’s visual ambition and its adaptation choices — how the production team rendered Macondo’s yellow butterflies, how the magic felt earned rather than imposed. Less examined was what Vittorino brought to the specific problem of playing a character whose defining quality is excess. He had spent years in productions where excess meant violence; here it meant something closer to the Latin American Romantic tradition — the man whose appetites are so absolute they function as a kind of heroism, however self-destructive. Part 2 of the series arrives on Netflix in August 2026, completing the Buendía family’s arc and Macondo’s final dissolution.

He remains active in the Colombian industry through all of this: Un padre muy madre (2025), a romantic comedy set in the Guajira peninsula, and Susana y Elvira: Sin Plan B, shot in Palomino and headed to Netflix, represent a deliberate investment in work that does not require him to play anyone’s idea of a threat. At thirty-eight, he occupies a position that four years of Spanish prime-time villainy made possible but could not have predicted: the Colombian actor whose most visible work now lives inside the same fictional universe as the greatest novel his country ever produced.

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Tags: actors, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Below Zero, Colombian actors, Daniel Calparsoro, Édgar Vittorino

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