Manolo Cardona, the telenovela leading man who would rather run the show

Manolo Cardona

Photo: Clarovideo / CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	April 25, 1977 Popayán, Colombia
Occupation	Actor and producer
Known for	War of Likes, Beverly Hills Chihuahua, Undertow
Awards	Imagen

For most of his career Manolo Cardona has been cast as the man other people want, or the man other people wronged. The seducer and the avenger have paid his bills across Colombia, Mexico, Spain and, eventually, Netflix. The more interesting story has been happening away from the camera. With his brothers he built a production company, and his name now turns up in the credits where decisions get made: executive producer, director, the actor who brings a project to a studio instead of waiting to be called. This year his face carried three different series, and on one of them he was also the boss. Whether the audience that made him a telenovela heartthrob will follow him into the producer’s chair is the question his career is asking now.

The nickname came before the career. His family was already calling Manuel Julián Cardona Molano “Manolo” when he was seven, and the name stuck all the way onto the posters. He grew up between Popayán, the city in Colombia’s Cauca department where he was born, and Cali, where he shot a shoe commercial at fourteen and walked local runways as a teenage model. He enrolled in finance and international relations at eighteen. Television got to him first.

His debut came in Padres e hijos, the long-running family series, as Nicolás Franco; Cardona, born on 25 April 1977, was not yet twenty. In 1998 he landed his first prime-time lead in Carolina Barrantes, and a year later ¿Por qué diablos? gave him Juan Diablo Cantor, a thief with good instincts, the role that marked the rest of his television career. After Amor a mil in 2001 he signed an exclusive deal with Telemundo and Argos Comunicación and moved his career to Mexico: Ladrón de corazones in 2003 opposite the late Lorena Rojas, Gitanas in 2004 and, in 2006, Marina, where he stepped in for Mauricio Ochmann.

Cinema arrived through literature. His film debut was Rosario Tijeras, the 2005 adaptation of Jorge Franco’s Medellín novel, followed the same year by La mujer de mi hermano with Bárbara Mori and Christian Meier. Disney then cast him as Sam Cortez in Beverly Hills Chihuahua, and the Imagen Awards named him best supporting actor in a feature film in 2009; he accepted the prize by phone from Spain. The braver choice of those years was Undertow (Contracorriente), Javier Fuentes-León’s drama set in a Peruvian fishing village, in which Cardona plays Santiago, a gay painter in love with a married fisherman. The film won the World Cinema Audience Award for drama at Sundance, and it remains the clearest proof of what he can do when a part asks him to be quiet rather than irresistible.

At home, the turning point was El Cartel. Caracol’s 2008 series, based on the prison memoir of former trafficker Andrés López López, cast him as Martín González, alias “Fresita”, and became the most-watched show on Colombian television; when Telemundo aired it in the United States it set a ratings record for the network. The feature version, El cártel de los sapos, was the first film produced by 11:11 Films & TV, the company he runs with his brothers Juancho and Francisco. The international work that followed was steady rather than central: Telecinco’s Sin tetas no hay paraíso, Globo’s Aquele Beijo, Border Run with Sharon Stone, The CW’s Reign and, in the first season of Narcos, Eduardo Sandoval, the vice minister of justice.

The streaming breakthrough came in Who Killed Sara? (¿Quién mató a Sara?) he played Álex Guzmán, a man who spends eighteen years in prison for his sister’s murder and comes out hunting the family he believes framed him. Netflix said 55 million households watched the series in its first four weeks in 2021, which at the time made it the platform’s most popular non-English title. That visibility paid off for the company: in November 2021 Viacom International Studios signed a first-look deal with 11:11. The first result was Uno para morir, his debut as a feature director, released on Paramount+ in May 2023: seven strangers wake up in a locked house and are told to choose which of them will die. He cast Maribel Verdú, played one of the captives himself and presented the film as a homage to Korean cinema. It was also the last screen performance of Fernando Becerril, who died before it came out.

The weak point in the story is that his range and his reach have rarely met. The parts that travel furthest are the revenge thrillers and the high-gloss melodramas, while the performance that earned him the most serious notice, in Undertow, belongs to a small Peruvian film that most of his streaming audience has never seen. Medusa, Netflix’s 2025 Colombian thriller, showed both sides of that bargain. As Danger Carmelo, a Barranquilla private investigator with friends in the police, he took the brunt of viewers’ complaints about the cast’s imitation of the Caribbean coastal accent,. The series still climbed to the top of Netflix’s most-watched list and was renewed after fifteen days. Audiences watched him while complaining about him, which is a kind of success, but not the kind that tells anyone what he is capable of.

The first months of 2026 were his busiest in years. On 24 April ViX premiered Los encantos del sinvergüenza, adapted from Ángela Becerra’s novel, in which he plays Francisco Valiente, a charming businessman who, from beyond the grave, tries to work out which of his lovers killed him; he is also an executive producer, alongside Juancho Cardona and Patricio Wills. On 22 July Netflix released My Daughter’s Father (El otro padre), Roberto Stopello’s miniseries with Silvia Navarro and Erik Hayser, in which Cardona plays Ricardo, the man who raised Julieta for more than twenty years and learns, when she needs a kidney transplant, that he is not her biological father. It entered Netflix’s top ten in Latin America, the United States and Spain. On 30 September the second season of Medusa arrived, with Danger Carmelo back beside Juana Acosta’s Bárbara Hidalgo.

He married the lawyer Valeria Santos in Cartagena and keeps his family life largely out of his publicity.

The next test is a film. Pacífico, Gonzalo Gutiérrez’s science-fiction creature feature about young travellers stranded on a Pacific island with something ancient and hostile, had its world premiere in July at the Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival in South Korea. Its producers at FilmSharks put the budget at around ten million dollars and have yet to announce release dates for Europe and North America. After three decades as the reason people tune in, a genre ensemble is a different kind of bet for him, and its release will show whether his audience follows.

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Tags: actors, Manolo Cardona, Juana Acosta, Narcos, My Daughter's Father, Silvia Navarro, Who Killed Sara

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