Carlos Areces

Info

Full Name: Carlos Areces
Date of birth: March 27, 1976 (50 years old)
Location: Madrid
Country: Spain

Carlos Areces has been active for 2026 years, participating in 43 movies that average a 5.5/10 score.

Videos eCartelera

Tráiler en VOSE de 'Harry Potter' T1

Biography

If you know Carlos Areces at all, it's probably as the soft, sad clown at the centre of 'A Sad Trumpet Ballad', the Álex de la Iglesia film that reached British cinemas in 2011 as 'The Last Circus'. In Spain he's rather more than that: a comedian, a cartoonist, the singer in a joke techno band and one of the most recognisable faces on Spanish television. He was born in Madrid on 27 March 1976.

Fine arts in Cuenca and a cult sketch show

Areces drew long before he acted. Signing his work as Carlös, he contributed to fanzines and to the magazines 'Mister K' and 'El Jueves', where for years he ran a page called 'Garrote vil'. In 1995 he left Madrid to study fine arts in Cuenca, and there he met the group of friends from Albacete who would end up shaping his career: Joaquín Reyes, Ernesto Sevilla, Raúl Cimas, Julián López and Pablo Chiapella.

In 2002 that gang launched 'La hora chanante' on Paramount Comedy and Areces came aboard as a contributor, staying four seasons. It was made on almost no money, it was extremely odd, and it rewired Spanish comedy around pop culture references, deliberately terrible impressions and a completely straight face. The team moved to public television with 'Muchachada Nui' between 2007 and 2010, where Areces also drew an animated strand called 'Los Klamstein'.

Two more cult shows followed. In 'Museo Coconut' he played both the owner of the museum and its tour guide, and in 'Plutón B.R.B. Nero' he was a lieutenant aboard the shabby spaceship that Álex de la Iglesia built for Spanish public TV.

The clown who went to Venice

His breakthrough on screen came when De la Iglesia cast him as Javier in 'A Sad Trumpet Ballad' (2010), a circus performer who falls for another clown's partner and ends up disfigured and murderous. The story runs from the Spanish Civil War to the last years of the Franco dictatorship, and it's every bit as savage as that sounds. At Venice, with Quentin Tarantino chairing the jury, it took the Silver Lion for Best Director and the screenplay prize.

Back home the film picked up fifteen Goya nominations and Areces wasn't in any of them, an omission that got plenty of coverage at the time. He did win the Sant Jordi Award for Best Actor in 2011, shared with the film's other lead, Antonio de la Torre.

A face in almost everything

He has barely stopped since. He worked with De la Iglesia again on 'Witching & Bitching' (2013) and 'My Great Night' (2015), boarded the plane in Pedro Almodóvar's 'I'm so Excited' (2013) and turned up twice for Nacho Vigalondo, in 'Extraterrestrial' (2012) and 'Open Windows' (2014). Genre fans will also spot him in 'Game of Werewolves' (2012).

The list of Spanish comedies on his CV is enormous: 'Ghost Graduation' (2012), 'Negociador' (2014) for Borja Cobeaga, 'Anacleto: Agente secreto' (2015), 'Heroes Wanted' (2016), 'Some Time After' (2018) and 'García y García' (2021), among plenty of others. He played Franco for Fernando Trueba in 'La reina de España' (2016), and he has been part of Santiago Segura's Torrente films since 'Torrente 4: Lethal Crisis' (2011).

Animation suits him too, whether voicing 'Ozzy' (2016) or the stop motion horror comedy 'Pos eso' (2014). So does straighter material: 'El inconveniente' (2020), 'Orígenes secretos' (2020) and 'The Fourth Passenger' (2022). In 2023 he shared the lead of 'Alimañas' with Jordi Sánchez, who directed it alongside Pep Anton Gómez.

March 2026 brought 'Torrente presidente', the sixth film in Segura's series and now comfortably its biggest earner at the Spanish box office.

Undertakers, techno pop and 6,000 communion photos

Television has kept him busiest of all. He was Juanjo Soler, a corrupt developer ruined by the property crash, in 'El pueblo' (2019). In 'La que se avecina' he first showed up as Patricio Requena, then settled in from season eleven as Agustín Gordillo, a psychiatric patient passing himself off as a psychiatrist.

His first outright lead arrived in 2024 with 'Muertos S.L.', a pitch black funeral parlour comedy created by Alberto Caballero and Laura Caballero. Netflix picked it up in 2025 and streams it worldwide as 'Death Inc.', with the fourth and final season landing on 7 August 2026. Elsewhere he has turned up in 'The Red Eagle', 'No Activity', '30 monedas', 'No me gusta conducir', 'Alpha Males' and, in 2025, 'Superestar'.

Then there's the band. In 2005, over drinks in a Madrid bar, Areces and Aníbal Gómez came up with Ojete Calor, a techno pop duo with deliberately idiotic lyrics that began as a private joke and ended up filling Madrid's old Palacio de los Deportes. They've released two albums, 'Delayed' (2013) and 'Pataky' (2017), and they're still touring twenty years on.

Off duty he describes himself as a pathologically obsessive collector, and the numbers back him up: roughly 150 post mortem photographs, some 6,000 communion portraits, around 2,000 boxed figurines and several thousand records. The mortuary photography started with an interview in which Alejandro Amenábar mentioned a book he had used as a reference for 'The Others'. On his private life he gives away almost nothing, and there's no sign of that changing.