Tamar Novas, the Galician actor who spent twenty years between two Goya nights

Tamar Novas

Photo: Pedro J Pacheco / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	October 3, 1986 Santiago de Compostela, Spain
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Nowhere, The Sea Inside, Broken Embraces
Awards	Goya · Unión de Actores

Winning a major acting prize as a teenager settles one question and opens a harder one. Tamar Novas took the Goya for best new actor for playing the restless nephew of a paralysed former sailor in Alejandro Amenábar’s The Sea Inside, and the follow-up question has trailed him ever since: what does a boy do after the role everybody remembers? His answer has been patience. He became the actor Spanish film and television call when they need someone believable in the second chair, and two decades later a comedy about a village band brought him back to the same awards night as a nominee.

That return matters because of the distance it measures. The Spanish press still introduces him as the Galician boy from The Sea Inside, a label that flatters the start and erases most of what came after it. The work in between is a long, uneven list of supporting parts, crime series and stage productions, much of it set in his own Galicia, and it is where his real career lives.

Novas was born on 3 October 1986 in Santiago de Compostela, to a family with roots in Arzúa and Melide in inland A Coruña. He was eleven when José Luis Cuerda’s casting team found him while preparing Butterfly’s Tongue, the director’s adaptation of Manuel Rivas set in a Galician village on the eve of the Civil War. Novas played Roque, a schoolboy in the film’s small world, and the shoot was his first time on a film set. He later studied Communication Sciences at the University of Santiago de Compostela.

Amenábar cast him next as Javi, the teenage nephew of Ramón Sampedro, the quadriplegic Galician played by Javier Bardem who fought for years for the right to end his own life. The Sea Inside won the Oscar for best foreign language film and the Grand Jury Prize in Venice; Novas, surrounded by Bardem, Lola Dueñas, Belén Rueda and Celso Bugallo, held his own in a role built on adolescent impatience. He won the Goya for best new actor and the Spanish actors’ union award in the same category.

The years that followed were not a straight climb. He became a familiar face in Galicia through the TVG series A vida por diante, took a small part in Miloš Forman’s Goya’s Ghosts, and then landed in Pedro Almodóvar‘s Broken Embraces as Diego, the young man who looks after the blind screenwriter played by Lluís Homar. The film competed at Cannes and gave Novas his widest international exposure, though the role kept him on the edge of a story built around Penélope Cruz and Blanca Portillo.

Television carried him through the next decade. He played Jaime Holgado in Acusados, Alejandro de la Serna in the Antena 3 daily serial Bandolera and John III of Portugal in Carlos, rey emperador. In 2018 he joined Fariña, the series about the Galician cocaine trade of the 1980s, as Roque. Netflix then turned him into a regular: two seasons of the period mystery High Seas, the high-school thriller The Mess You Leave Behind opposite Inma Cuesta and Bárbara Lennie, and in 2024 Gangs of Galicia, where he plays Daniel Padín, a son of a smuggling clan pulled back into the family business, opposite Clara Lago. On film he worked with Isabel Coixet on Elisa & Marcela and with Paco Plaza on Quien a hierro mata, both released in 2019.

The stage has been the quieter counterweight. Under the direction of Juan Carlos Corazza he performed in Comedia y Sueño, a montage of Lorca and Shakespeare that earned him a nomination from the actors’ union for supporting stage performance, and for Corazza’s Hambre, locura y genio he composed and played the original music. In 2014 he appeared in Fernando Fernán Gómez’s El viaje a ninguna parte at the Centro Dramático Nacional, directed by Carol López.

The weakness in this career is also its selling point. Novas is so dependable that casting directors have tended to use him for the same thing: the sensitive man pulled into a darker Galician story, whether in Fariña, in Gangs of Galicia or in a run of thrillers. Spanish television has made the Galician coast its favourite backdrop for narcotics drama, and Novas has become one of the faces of that cycle without ever getting the role that would break it open. The child-star frame does him no favours either: twenty years of steady work are routinely summarised by one film he made as a teenager.

Rondallas was the first real answer to both problems. Daniel Sánchez Arévalo’s comedy, which premiered out of competition at San Sebastián in September 2025 and opened in Spanish cinemas on 1 January 2026, follows a Galician fishing village trying to revive its traditional string band two years after a shipwreck killed seven crew members. Novas plays a rural guard obsessed with the band and locked in a rivalry with his brother, played by Xosé A. Touriñán, over who gets to carry its banner. He plays the guitar in life, which helped. Critics singled out his comic timing, and the role earned him a nomination for best supporting actor at the 40th Goya Awards in Barcelona on 28 February 2026. The prize went to Álvaro Cervantes for Sorda.

The rest of 2026 has kept him in thrillers. In March he led Caminando con el diablo, Rubén Pérez Barrena’s debut feature, as Miguel, a father whose son disappears in rural 1980s Spain, opposite Marina Salas. In April the second season of Gangs of Galicia arrived on Netflix, with Luis Zahera joining the cast. He also shot Ardora, a five-episode legal thriller directed by Jorge Coira for Movistar Plus+, filmed in and around A Coruña and due in 2027.

He has kept his private life mostly out of the press. His relationship with the actress Belén Cuesta, whom he met on the set of Bandolera, lasted about a decade; since 2023 he has been with the singer Marilia Monzón. He has lived in Madrid since the mid-2000s and still goes back to Santiago between jobs.

Next comes Collision Course, Sánchez Arévalo’s first thriller, which Netflix releases on 30 October 2026. A bank robbery in Madrid during the financial crisis goes wrong, and Novas shares the screen with Laia Costa, Karra Elejalde, Luis Zahera, Lluís Homar and Álvaro Cervantes, the man who beat him to the Goya in February. The film reunites him with Ramón Campos’s Bambú Producciones, the company behind Fariña, High Seas and Rondallas, and it is another chance to show what the boy from The Sea Inside has been doing all along.

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Tags: actors, Spanish cinema, Alejandro Amenábar, Daniel Sánchez Arévalo, Tamar Novas, The Sea Inside

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