Osvaldo Benavides: the Nandito kid who walked away and came back in charge

The internet still keeps a teenage Osvaldo Benavides on file: Nandito, the boy Soraya Montenegro could not stop chasing in María la del Barrio, recycled for three decades as a meme. The man himself spent this October on two screens at once. On Netflix he is Jaime, a businessman who deals in other people’s information in the thriller El círculo. On ViX he plays a character drawn from the producer at the centre of the most uncomfortable chapter in Mexican pop, in Timbiriche, a series he also executive-produced. The distance between those two versions was not covered by staying put. Benavides got there by leaving.

A Mexico City kid who started acting at nine, he got his first telenovela early: El abuelo y yo put him in a cast with two other children, Gael García Bernal and Ludwika Paleta, who would spend the next decades proving they were more than Televisa’s kids. Then came María la del Barrio, the Thalía melodrama in which he played the heroine’s lost son, Nandito, while Itatí Cantoral’s Soraya Montenegro made the boy the object of an obsession that Latin American television has never quite stopped quoting.

Nandito ran for 185 episodes and won him the TVyNovelas award for best young lead actor. Te sigo amando, where he played Lazarito alongside Claudia Ramírez, won him the same prize again, which leaves him tied with Ernesto Laguardia as the category’s most decorated name. Cinema arrived while he was still a teenager, Benavides having been born on 14 June 1979. La primera noche gave him his first film role, and the road comedy Por la libre, where he played Rocco, confirmed he could carry a feature. Piedras verdes, La segunda noche and Seres humanos came in quick succession, then a part as Curiosito in Luis Estrada’s satire Un mundo maravilloso. On stage he took on Trainspotting, Zucco and an adaptation of The Graduate.

And then he mostly stepped off the telenovela treadmill. Rather than chase the leading-man contract that usually follows a child star’s awards, Benavides moved behind the camera, directing commercials and music videos for Agave Shots, a production house in Mexico City. It is the least documented stretch of his career and the one that explains the rest: he learned the job from the side where decisions get made.

The return came through Televisa’s front door. In 2011 producer José Alberto Castro cast him in La que no podía amar, after smaller turns in the series Soy tu fan. In 2013 he played Dimitrio Mendoza in Angelli Nesma’s Lo que la vida me robó, opposite Angelique Boyer and Sebastián Rulli, and in 2015 he finally took the lead, as Adrián Olmedo opposite Camila Sodi in A que no me dejas. Estrada called him back for La dictadura perfecta, his 2014 attack on the alliance between television and political power, a film that reads with some irony now that he is back making television on Televisa’s own lot.

The streaming era widened the map. He played Andrés Carranza in Netflix’s tequila-dynasty drama Monarca, then crossed to American network television. The Good Doctor introduced him in its fourth-season finale as Dr. Mateo Rendón Osma, a surgeon who follows Christina Chang’s Audrey Lim to San Jose; ABC promoted him to series regular for the fifth season and then wrote him out by its fifth episode, packing Mateo off to Guatemala. The Hollywood door opened and shut inside a few months. He went straight back to work in Spanish, as a lead opposite Silvia Navarro in Telemundo’s La suerte de Loli.

His first feature as director, Noche de bodas, a romantic comedy he also wrote, produced and starred in alongside Ludwika Paleta, carries a shadow he has never tried to hide. During the Oaxaca shoot in October 2022, two extras, Marco Antonio Curiel Pérez and Luis Manuel Gutiérrez, drowned when the tide caught them on the beach. Benavides said publicly that it happened on their day off, away from the set. The film reached audiences in 2024. That same year he joined Prime Video‘s Cada minuto cuenta, the drama about the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, as Ángel.

Timbiriche is where his career and his convictions are being tested in public. The character he plays is inspired by Luis de Llano, the producer whom Sasha Sokol accused of abusing her when she was a minor, and the litigation is still alive. Benavides, an executive producer on the show, told the press at Televisa San Ángel that “you can’t ignore reality” when you portray a living person, and in the same breath insisted that the series is “an entertainment product first of all”. Those two positions do not sit easily together. Six of the band’s original members, Sokol among them alongside Benny Ibarra, Alix Bauer, Mariana Garza, Diego Schoening and Erik Rubín, said they took no part in the project and did not authorise the use of their image, while De Llano’s lawyers announced his opposition to any use of his. Benavides admitted he would not have cast himself in the part. The question the show leaves him with is sharper than a casting choice: whether an actor-producer can claim both social responsibility and the right to simply entertain, and be believed on both counts.

The rest of his year has been crowded. Early in 2026 he returned to Televisa’s studios after a decade away with Hermanas, un amor compartido, playing Alonso, the man Danna García’s character falls for. He shared a stage with Esmeralda Pimentel in Siete veces adiós. El círculo, adapted from Jorge Zepeda Patterson’s novel Los corruptores and created by Alejandro Lozano, premiered on Netflix on 7 October with Zuria Vega, Michel Brown and Raúl Briones, and within two days ranked second among the platform’s trending titles in Mexico. Timbiriche opened on Las Estrellas on 8 October before landing on ViX the following day.

He keeps his private life largely out of view; he is a father of two. Of Nandito, he now says the character “formed me” and that he values it. The tone of that sentence is the useful part. Benavides spent years running from the boy the audience would not let go of, and has come back as the one deciding what that audience gets to see. Timbiriche will be the measure of how well he uses that position.

Tags: actors, Inside The Circle, Ludwika Paleta, Osvaldo Benavides, María la del Barrio, Noche de bodas