Hovik Keuchkerian, Money Heist’s Bogotá and the poet casting directors keep missing

Hovik Keuchkerian

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

Born	November 14, 1972 Beirut, Lebanon
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Assassin's Creed, The Platform 2, Toro
Awards	Silver Shell · Feroz (shared) · Forqué · MiM Series · Unión de Actores

For a long stretch of his adult life Hovik Keuchkerian was paid to knock people down, and he was very good at it: fifteen of his sixteen professional wins as a heavyweight ended by knockout. Spanish screens have never quite let him forget it. Casting directors see the size of him and write him in as the muscle, the man who welds the vault open or holds the riot line. What they keep getting is stranger than the brief. He published poetry before he ever acted, he made Madrid laugh for three seasons on the Gran Vía, and his best work in front of a camera tends to arrive when that enormous frame goes still.

Beirut is where the story starts. He was born there to an Armenian father and a Spanish mother, and the Lebanese civil war settled the rest: when he was three, the family left for Spain. He grew up in Alpedrete, in the hills north-west of Madrid, waiting tables in his father’s restaurant, and at twenty moved to the capital, where he later opened his own gym in the Hortaleza district.

Fighting arrived sideways. The boy born in Beirut on 14 November 1972 grew up playing basketball until an ankle injury pushed him toward kickboxing, where he won a national title in 1996; a year later he was Spain’s amateur heavyweight boxing champion. He turned professional in 1999, took the vacant Spanish heavyweight title from David Blanco in 2003 and defended it in 2004. At the end of that year, fed up with how the professional sport was run, he quit with sixteen wins and one defeat.

What came next would read as implausible in a screenplay. His friend the magician Jorge Blass coaxed him onto a Madrid stage for a short monologue, and by 2010 he was recording a set for Paramount Comedy. That material grew into Un mendigo con zapatos de algodón, a show that ran on the Gran Vía from 2011 to 2013 and slid between punchlines and passages close to verse. The verse was not a pose. He had already published Cartas desde el Palmar, written on the beach at El Palmar de Vejer, and in 2014 released Resiliente, a book sold with a CD of his own recitations over music by Yuri Méndez of Pájaro Sunrise.

Television first used him as Sandro, the village blacksmith in Hispania, la leyenda on Antena 3. The film that changed his standing was Alacrán enamorado (Scorpion in Love), Santiago Zannou’s adaptation of Carlos Bardem’s novel, in which he played Pedro, the owner of a boxing gym. It brought a Goya nomination for best new actor and the Unión de Actores award in the same category. Foreign productions followed: Susanne Bier cast him as Tabby in The Night Manager, alongside Hugh Laurie and Tom Hiddleston, and he played Ojeda in the screen version of Assassin’s Creed.

Then came Bogotá. Álex Pina‘s Money Heist (La casa de papel) recruited him for its third part as the gang’s welder and diver, the specialist who gets them through the flooded vault of the Bank of Spain, and he stayed until the Netflix series ended in 2021. Twenty-six episodes made his face familiar far beyond Spain.

That global audience met a version of him that is easy to underrate. Bogotá is a supporting part in an ensemble engineered for spectacle, and for many viewers abroad Keuchkerian is still the big, warm heister, a type rather than an actor. The work that argues otherwise was mostly seen at home. In Rodrigo Sorogoyen and Isabel Peña’s Riot Police (Antidisturbios) he played Salva Osorio, one of six officers in a Madrid riot unit whose eviction operation ends in a death, and he made the man’s loyalty to his squad look like both his decency and his trap. The role won him the Forqué for best television actor and a Feroz, shared with Eduard Fernández. Isabel Coixet then gave him Andreas in Un amor, the taciturn neighbour in a remote village who offers a young woman, played by Laia Costa, a repair to her roof in exchange for sex. He made the offer frightening and the man impossible to dismiss, and the San Sebastián festival gave him its Silver Shell for best supporting performance in 2023. A few months later the Goya academy nominated the same performance in the lead actor category. The industry still cannot decide how much room to give him, and when it does, he fills it with restraint.

His Armenian roots reached the screen through Amerikatsi, Michael Goorjian’s film about an American who moves to Soviet Armenia after the Second World War. Keuchkerian played Tigran, the prison guard whose life the hero watches from his cell, and the film became the first Armenian production shortlisted for the Academy Award for best international feature. Asked about the source of all this, he told El Periódico in 2022 that he would be a different actor if he had not been a boxer.

The past two years have kept him busy, not always in roles that stretch him. In 2024 he led Reina Roja (Red Queen) for Prime Video with Vicky Luengo, as Jon Gutiérrez, a Basque inspector on the edge of dismissal; he was Zamiatin opposite Milena Smit in El hoyo 2 (The Platform 2); and he went back inside a bank full of hostages as Berni in Daniel Calparsoro‘s Asalto al Banco Central (Bank Under Siege), the Netflix miniseries about the real 1981 siege in Barcelona, which much of the press sold through the Money Heist connection. In 2025 he played Norman Graf, an insomniac patient, in SkyShowtime’s Matices, joined the Netflix miniseries Dos tumbas and took a police role in Ya no quedan junglas, opposite Ron Perlman.

He has also gone back to where he began. Grito, a stand-up show he writes, performs and directs, has been touring Spanish theatres since 2025, his first return to the form in more than a decade. Its targets are war, intolerance and the manipulation of news, unusual material for a comic and familiar ground for a man whose family fled a war when he was three.

Next comes the clearest test yet of whether television will let him lead on his own terms. On 30 October 2026 Disney+ premieres Caldas: El último barco, a six-episode adaptation of Domingo Villar’s crime novel, with Javier Gutiérrez as the Vigo inspector Leo Caldas and Keuchkerian as Rafael Estévez, his impulsive partner from Aragón. For an actor who spent years being cast for his fists, the interesting part will be how little of the character he chooses to play with them.