Julio Peña, from Netflix heartthrob to Amenábar’s Cervantes, and back

Julio Peña

Photo: Unknown authorUnknown author / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	July 15, 2000 San Sebastián, Spain
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Through My Window, Through My Window: Across the Sea, Through My Window 3: Looking at You

There are two Julio Peñas in circulation, and they seldom share an audience. One is Ares Hidalgo, the wealthy, brooding neighbour of a Netflix romance trilogy, whose face fans from Buenos Aires to Madrid can pick out of a crowd. The other is the young soldier who spends five years as a prisoner in Algiers in Alejandro Amenábar’s The Captive, a performance that earned him a nomination from the Spanish film academy. The question his career is asking now is whether he has to choose between them, or whether a single actor can keep both of those audiences.

San Sebastián is his birthplace, but Madrid is where he grew up, and where the stage reached him early. He took theatre classes at school, enrolled in acting workshops around the city and studied piano for nine years.

He was born on 15 July 2000, was performing in youth productions from 2012 and, by his late teens, was starring in musicals at Madrid’s Teatro Arcadia, among them versions of Alice in Wonderland, Corpse Bride and Moulin Rouge!. The break came through a casting call he almost skipped: he was a student at the Jana theatre school in Madrid when the producers of Bia, a Disney Channel Latin America series, came looking for a male lead. Reluctant at first, he passed the final tests, moved to Buenos Aires, where the show was made, and spent two seasons as Manuel Gutiérrez opposite Isabela Souza, singing on the soundtrack as well. The role brought nominations at the Kids’ Choice Awards in Mexico and the SEC Awards in Brazil, and a fan base that would follow him home. A Disney+ special, Bia: Un mundo al revés, closed the story in 2021.

Back in Spain, he took the less glamorous jobs that build a working actor. He joined the long-running TVE period soap Acacias 38 as Guillermo Sacristán for its final months, played in the Spanish-language production of the musical Something Rotten! at the Teatro Arapiles, appeared in Raúl Barranco’s play Embrague and turned up as the love interest in the video for Aitana’s song “Berlín”.

Then came Through My Window (A través de mi ventana), released by Netflix in February 2022. Directed by Marçal Forés from the novel by Ariana Godoy, it cast Peña as Ares, the rich boy next door, opposite Clara Galle. According to Deadline, the film logged 68 million views in its first two weeks on the platform. Two sequels followed, Through My Window: Across the Sea in June 2023 and Through My Window 3: Looking at You in February 2024, and Ares carried him through all three.

That fame arrived with almost no critical cover. The first film holds a 0% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, from six reviews, and Janire Zurbano of Cinemanía gave it two stars out of five, describing “sex, attempts of female empowerment and the same old toxic cliches”. Ares was the kind of role that sells subscriptions and narrows what casting directors imagine an actor can do. Peña’s real problem after 2024 was not visibility. It was credibility, and the trilogy that made him a star gave him very little of it.

Berlin, the Money Heist spin-off built around Pedro Alonso‘s gentleman thief, widened the frame. Peña joined its main cast in December 2023 as Roi, sharing the screen with Michelle Jenner, Tristán Ulloa and Begoña Vargas, and he returned for the second season, Berlin and the Lady with an Ermine, which moved the gang to Seville and premiered on Netflix on 15 May 2026.

The decisive turn, though, came from Amenábar, who chose him to play Miguel de Cervantes in The Captive (El cautivo). The Spanish-Italian co-production, with a reported budget of around 14 million euros, follows the future author of Don Quixote through his years of captivity in Algiers and his charged bond with his captor, Hasán Bajá, played by Alessandro Borghi. It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on 7 September 2025 and opened in Spanish cinemas five days later, after a wave of online outrage at the film’s suggestion of an intimate relationship between Cervantes and Hasán. Amenábar said he was not claiming that Cervantes was gay. Peña was blunter. “It’s a bit depressing that people worry so much about that when they haven’t even seen the film,” he told eCartelera, “and nothing is imposed in it, and history is not rewritten.”

The reviews were warmer than the noise: 71% of the critics counted by Rotten Tomatoes were positive, and even a lukewarm notice in Hipertextual singled out his work while finding the story less gripping than it promised. At the 40th Goya Awards in February 2026 he was nominated for Best New Actor, a prize that went to Toni Fernández Gabarre for Ciudad sin sueño; the Círculo de Escritores Cinematográficos nominated him in the same category. The Captive left the ceremony with the Goya for Best Makeup and Hairstyles.

What he does with that credibility is the story of the next year. On 7 October 2026, Deadline reported that Peña had joined Throttled, Amazon MGM’s adaptation of the first novel in Lauren Asher’s Dirty Air series, directed by Nzingha Stewart from a script by Melissa Osborne and produced by Elizabeth Banks and Max Handelman. He plays Santi Alatorre, a Formula One driver whose younger sister, Maya, played by Nicole Wallace, falls for his teammate and fiercest rival, Noah Slade, played by Josh Heuston. The same report places him in an untitled series based on the A24 horror film Talk to Me.

Throttled puts him back in the genre that made him famous, with one telling change: this time he is the brother standing between the lovers, not the boy at the window. Whether audiences follow him there, and whether Spanish auteurs keep calling after Cervantes, will decide which Julio Peña lasts.

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Through My Window 3: Looking at You (2024) — The Captive (2025) — as Miguel

Tags: actors, Spanish cinema, Berlin, Clara Galle, Julio Peña, Alejandro Amenábar, Through My Window

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