Victoria Luengo, the actress who kept hitting the wall until it cracked

Victoria Luengo

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

Born	April 7, 1990 Palma, Mallorca, Spain
Occupation	Actress
Known for	The Room Next Door, The Occupant, The Beloved
Awards	Ondas · Fotogramas de Plata · Gaudí · Actors and Actresses Union · Talía · Premio Princesa de Girona

Victoria Luengo has a precise image for the years before anyone knew her name. Throughout her twenties, she told the Catalan daily Ara this summer, the picture she had of herself in this profession “was that of a person hitting a wall.” The wall held. Each blow, she says, left only a small crack, and she went back to hit it again. Luengo now carries Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s El ser querido opposite Javier Bardem, has been cast by Pedro Almodóvar twice in a row and plays the lead of Prime Video‘s Reina Roja. The open question is what an actress shaped by a decade of resistance does now that the wall has cracked open.

María Victoria Luengo Sáez came into the world in Palma, on Mallorca, and was four when she moved to Barcelona with her mother and brother. She grew up in the Sagrada Família district and trained in acting, dance and singing at the city’s Escola Memory. Her first professional stage job came at fourteen, in a children’s musical. The moment she has described as the one when she truly felt like an actress arrived much later, with Una història catalana at the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya.

Those years, for an actress born on 7 April 1990, were busy and largely invisible. She worked in Catalan television, then landed a leading part in the Telecinco crime series Homicidios in 2011. She played the title role in Jacques Malaterre’s French television film Carmen, won a best actress prize at the New York City International Film Festival for Claudio Zulian’s Born, and appeared in Mateo Gil’s Las leyes de la termodinámica. On paper it looks like a steady career. In her own account it was closer to chance: “it’s a lottery; the most normal thing is that, even if you’re good, no one sees you.”

For most of that time she was billed as Vicky. She has explained that she adopted the diminutive early on because Victoria then sounded to her like an old woman’s name, and she has since asked to be known by the name she was given. The change is small on a poster. It also tracks a larger shift: the parts she is offered now are the ones a film is built around.

That shift has a date and a director. In Sorogoyen’s Antidisturbios, the 2020 Movistar+ series about a riot squad whose eviction raid goes wrong, Luengo played Laia Urquijo, the Internal Affairs officer sent to investigate them. Surrounded by six men running on adrenaline, she built a character out of stillness, and the series made her visible overnight. It brought her the Ondas award for best actress in Spanish fiction and the Fotogramas de Plata for television, along with nominations at the Feroz and Forqué awards. She is careful not to romanticise it. The breakthrough, she has said, “doesn’t depend on being a very good actress, or on your training.”

What followed was a run of choices that favoured risk over exposure. She played Marta, one of four childhood friends reunited in their old neighbourhood, in Carol Rodríguez Colás’s Chavalas, and co-led Mikel Gurrea’s debut Suro opposite Pol López, as half of a couple whose plan for a new life among the cork-oak forests exposes everything that divides them. Suro competed at San Sebastián, earned her a Goya nomination for best actress and won her the Gaudí award in the same category. Then came Prima Facie, Suzie Miller’s monologue about a defence barrister who becomes a sexual assault complainant, performed alone at Madrid’s Teatros del Canal from August 2023. It won her the Actors and Actresses Union award and a Talía award, and in early 2024 the Princesa de Girona Foundation gave her its arts prize, with the jury citing her love of the craft.

The critical reading of her career starts with the role that reached the widest audience. In Reina Roja, the 2024 Prime Video adaptation of Juan Gómez-Jurado’s bestseller, she plays Antonia Scott, presented as the most intelligent person alive, opposite Hovik Keuchkerian. The series gave her a commercial reach that none of her earlier work had, and a second season followed. Reviews, though, were mixed, and Antonia is a franchise device more than a person: brilliance is announced rather than discovered, the opposite of the opaque, self-contained women of Antidisturbios and Suro. Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door the same year offered prestige but only a small part. For an actress who calls her profession “very unmeritocratic, and very unobjective”, the irony is plain: the industry rewarded her most loudly for her least characteristic work.

The answer came in 2026, and it came in a cluster. In March, Almodóvar’s Amarga Navidad opened in Spanish cinemas with Luengo as Patricia, the friend who travels to Lanzarote with Bárbara Lennie’s grieving director, a woman she described as broken and “vampirised by a man”. In May both films went to Cannes, and El ser querido competed for the Palme d’Or. Sorogoyen and his co-writer Isabel Peña cast her as Emilia, a struggling actress whose estranged father, a celebrated and volatile director played by Bardem, offers her a part in his new film shooting in Fuerteventura. Marta Medina of El Confidencial counted her face-off with Bardem among the most dazzling performances of her career, and El País singled out the two leads as the best of the film. Released in Spain in late August, the film passed four million euros at the box office and made the Spanish Academy’s three-film Oscar shortlist.

A film about power on a set lands close to home. “Sometimes I have felt humiliated on a set,” she told Ara. Of Bardem and Almodóvar she says that “the best are also the best people”; with Sorogoyen and Peña she has “the feeling of being part of a theater company”.

The autumn has kept the pace. The second season of Reina Roja, subtitled Loba Negra, arrived on Prime Video on 2 October and moves Antonia Scott to the Costa del Sol. A week earlier, Gurrea’s second feature Sants premiered in competition at San Sebastián, with Luengo as Lali, a woman who comes back to Barcelona’s Sants neighbourhood to look after her dying mother, played by Ariadna Gil, and falls in with a gang that steals religious statues led by a former nun. Elastica Films releases it in Spanish cinemas on 26 February 2027. “I’ve always been very stubborn and persistent in all things,” she says. The wall she spent her twenties hitting has given way; what she does with the open space is the part of her career that is still being written.