Roberto Álamo, the two-time Goya winner who nearly sold his statuette to eat

Roberto Álamo

Photo: Rastrojo (D•ES) / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	1970 Madrid, Spain
Occupation	Actor
Known for	The Skin I Live In, May God Save Us, Take My Eyes
Awards	2 Goya · Max · Feroz · José María Forqué

The photographs were taken against red velvet. Roberto Álamo had set up one of his Goyas, the statuette Spain’s film academy gave him as best supporting actor, and was getting it ready for Wallapop, the second-hand app where Spaniards sell sofas and bicycles. Work arrived before the listing went up, and he found out afterwards that the award could not legally be sold. “I would have sold it to be able to eat, basically,” he told El Español. A man with two Goyas, a Max award for the stage and more than fifty films behind him came within a few clicks of putting his prize on the market. On a chat show the story gets a laugh. It is also an unusually honest description of a Spanish acting career.

The industry reads him from the outside first. The shaved head, the heavy arms and the rough voice have made him Spanish screen fiction’s default policeman, bruiser and man about to lose his temper, and the casting has not stopped. His next television lead is Casper, an RTVE miniseries in which he plays the title character, Ángel Suárez Flores, the robber whose criminal career the broadcaster puts at three decades. “Sometimes they decide that my build or my voice fits certain characters,” he said. “Well, blessed be, it feeds me.” The roles that made his name tend to work against that body.

He was born Roberto Martínez Felipe in Madrid in 1970 and did not arrive through a family trade. He trained as a draughtsman, a fact he still brings up when he describes reunions full of classmates who became architects, and then studied acting at Cristina Rota’s school. He joined Animalario, the Madrid theatre company founded by Alberto San Juan and Willy Toledo, and took small television parts in the late 1990s. Film came in pieces: a hairdresser in La mujer más fea del mundo, one of the friends in David Serrano’s Días de fútbol, a part in Icíar Bollaín’s Te doy mis ojos.

The turning point was a boxer. Urtain, written by Juan Cavestany, directed by Andrés Lima and co-produced by Animalario with the Centro Dramático Nacional, put him in the gloves of José Manuel Ibar, the Basque heavyweight known as Urtain who became European champion and took his own life in the early 1990s. Álamo played him from 2008 to 2010 and collected a string of stage prizes for it, including the Max award for best actor in 2010; TVE filmed the production for its Estudio 1 slot in 2011. The part fixed the template that the rest of his career keeps returning to: an enormous body carrying a man who is breaking.

Cinema caught up more slowly. Pedro Almodóvar cast him in La piel que habito as Zeca, the son who turns up at the surgeon’s mansion in a tiger costume after a robbery and sets off the film’s most violent turn. Antonio de la Torre became his recurring partner: the two led Dispongo de barcos, then played brothers in Daniel Sánchez Arévalo’s La gran familia española. That film won Álamo the Goya for best supporting actor in February 2014, and one of the nominees he beat was de la Torre, his brother on screen.

The lead role came from Rodrigo Sorogoyen. In Que Dios nos perdone, released in English as May God Save Us, Álamo is Javier Alfaro, an inspector with a violent streak, paired again with de la Torre to hunt a man who rapes and kills elderly women in a Madrid summer crowded by the 15-M protests and a papal visit. Alfaro won him the Goya for best actor in February 2017, along with the Feroz and Forqué prizes. Sorogoyen brought him back for the Movistar+ series Antidisturbios, where he plays José Antonio Úbeda, one of six riot officers whose eviction in central Madrid ends with a man dead, and the one who takes a neighbour’s phone and deletes her recording of it.

This is where the usual reading of Álamo gets too simple. The roles that drew the most praise are policemen whose violence is the subject, and he rejects the conclusion audiences often draw from them. “I don’t distrust the police, not at all,” he told El Español, arguing that fiction needs conflict for a story to work dramatically. His best recent screen work went somewhere else. In Javier Marco’s Josefina he plays Juan, a prison officer who watches a mother, played by Emma Suárez, visit her son every Sunday, and who invents a daughter behind bars called Josefina so he has a reason to talk to her. It earned him a Feroz nomination and asks nothing of his physique. Spanish television has offered him far more Úbedas than Juans: the TVE police drama Estoy vivo, then a former policeman wrongly jailed who walks out a criminal lawyer in Caronte. The prizes did not change the economics either. On El Hormiguero, promoting the Netflix horror film El páramo, he said that after the supporting-actor Goya the phone stayed silent for nine months, long enough for him to start drafting a CV to work as a waiter.

He has said it more than once in public, without self-pity. “I’m not rich, Hollywood isn’t the rest of the world,” he told El Español, estimating that of perhaps 8,000 actors in Spain only 2,000 or 3,000 can live from the job and only four or five per cent are comfortable, “and I’m not among them.” The same interview introduced a published poet: his collection Amantes venía de amar deals with childhood fears, lonely nights and sex.

The work has not dried up since. He played Dimas in La red púrpura and its sequel La nena, the Atresplayer follow-ups to La novia gitana. He was Abderramán in Alejandro Amenábar’s Cervantes drama El cautivo, which premiered at Toronto in September 2025, and Aitor Aguirre in the Netflix thriller Innato, opposite Imanol Arias and Elena Anaya, released that December. In August 2026 he appeared as Fernando, the father whose new girlfriend upends a family holiday, in Chema de la Peña’s Días de agosto.

Two projects now frame his autumn. Leones en invierno, Albert Pintó’s revenge thriller led by Luis Zahera, with Álamo billed second, opens in Spanish cinemas on 23 October 2026 through Sony Pictures. Casper, three 70-minute episodes created and directed by Joaquín Llamas, is shooting between Madrid, Murcia and the Canary Islands with Rodolfo Sancho as Inspector Pablo Losada on his trail, and no premiere date yet. After years of playing the men who make the arrests, Álamo is now the man the arrest is built around. The Goyas stayed off Wallapop.

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Tags: actors, Spanish cinema, Rodrigo Sorogoyen, Casper, Antidisturbios, Antonio de la Torre, Roberto Álamo

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