Pedro Alonso, the actor who decided to stop being Berlín

It is the kind of decision an actor is supposed to dread. Pedro Alonso has spent nearly a decade inhabiting Andrés de Fonollosa, the bored aristocrat-thief who became the most stubborn presence in La casa de papel — killed off in part two of the original series and then resurrected, again and again, because audiences refused to let him stay dead. He has a second and final season of the spin-off Berlín premiering this week, the franchise around him is being renewed for further expansion, and on the eve of that release he has said, on the record, that he is done. The choice is not financial. It is not bitter. It is something stranger: an actor deciding to walk out at the loudest possible moment, while the door is still open.

Born in Vigo in the summer of 1971, the son of a city on the Galician Atlantic coast where every other family has its own private relationship with the sea, Alonso left for Madrid in his twenties to train at the Real Escuela Superior de Arte Dramático. He moved through Teatro de la Danza, through experimental work with La Fura dels Baus and the Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico, and through the kind of hard, unglamorous Spanish theatre that does not produce overnight television stars. For most of his thirties he was a working actor with a recognizable face in Galicia and the occasional small part in national series. Nothing about the early arc suggested global fame.

What it did suggest was patience. He returned to Galicia to play Father Horacio Casares in Padre Casares on TVG, a regional priest-detective character he held for one hundred and thirty-six episodes between 2008 and 2015 — the kind of long sit-down that builds craft rather than buzz. By the time Antena 3 cast him in Gran Hotel in 2011, as the ruthless Diego Murquía, the silhouette of the actor he would become was already visible: a male lead who could be cruel without theatrics, intimate without softness, and very precisely seductive on screens that did not yet belong to algorithms.

Then came La casa de papel. The original 2017 Antena 3 run reached respectable numbers in Spain. The Netflix acquisition a few months later turned it into the platform’s most-watched non-English-language series, a phenomenon that broke from Buenos Aires to Mumbai to Istanbul. Alonso’s Berlín, theoretically a secondary character, became its emotional centre of gravity. The producers killed him; the audience refused to accept it; flashbacks brought him back across three more parts. By 2023 Netflix had built him his own spin-off, set in Paris and structured around his pre-heist past, and renewed it for a second season before the first one finished airing.

The Berlín spin-off is also where the contradiction sits. The character is, by any honest reading, a misogynist romantic — a man who treats love as an aesthetic project and the people around him as supporting cast. The first season tried to flirt with that without naming it. The second, Berlin and the Lady with an Ermine, which arrives on 15 May 2026 and moves the heist to Seville and a Leonardo da Vinci painting, reportedly leans further into the discomfort. Alonso has always defended the role by insisting it is the work of the show to interrogate Berlín, not endorse him. That defence has not always landed cleanly with critics who see in the character a charm that the writing does not adequately puncture.

His response to all of this, off-camera, has been to keep redirecting attention away from the spectacle. He has published a book, Libro de Filipo, with Grijalbo in 2020. He paints and exhibits under the pseudonym Pedro Alonso O’choro. And in early 2025 he premiered on Netflix a three-episode documentary called En la nave del encanto, which he co-directed and in which he travelled through Mexico to spend time with curanderos and ayahuasca circles, talking on camera about the depression he experienced at thirty and the long argument he has had with his own meditation practice ever since. It was not a vanity project. It was an actor trying to put on record that the version of him that fans recognise is not the version doing the choosing.

Which makes the timing of his exit legible. Last year’s Berlín shoot, he has said publicly, was physically and psychologically punishing. His longtime agent and close confidante Clara Heyman died in the middle of it. In several recent interviews he has spoken about feeling, for the first time across nine years, that the cycle had to close, and that closing it from inside the work rather than after the fact was the only honest move. He gave the announcement before the season aired, so that audiences would meet this Berlín already knowing he was the last one.

What comes next is more open than anything he has done since 2017. He is in a long relationship with the Paris-based hypnotherapist and artist Tatiana Djordjevic and has a grown daughter from an earlier relationship who studies fine arts. He has lived for years between Madrid, Paris and Mexico. He has no announced next leading role in Spanish television. The Berlín spin-off ends with him this season; the wider Money Heist universe continues without him. For the first time in almost a decade the next part of the sentence about Pedro Alonso is being written by Pedro Alonso, not by Netflix’s release calendar.

Tags: actors, Netflix, Spain