Eduardo Noriega

Info

Full Name: Eduardo Noriega Gómez
Date of birth: August 1, 1973 (53 years old)
Location: Santander, Cantabria
Country: Spain

Eduardo Noriega has been active for 31 years, participating in 30 movies that average a 6.1/10 score.

Videos eCartelera

Tráiler en VOSE de 'Harry Potter' T1

Biography

Eduardo Noriega was halfway through a law degree when he decided he would rather act, packed it in and moved to Madrid to train properly. It was not an obvious call. He was born in Santander on 1 August 1973, the youngest of seven, and nobody else in the family had gone anywhere near a film set. He had also been a keen musician as a boy, and dropped that too.

The decision paid off quickly. Alejandro Amenábar almost didn't cast him in 'Tesis' (1996), thinking he was too good looking for the part and not much else. He gave him the role anyway, the film won seven Goyas, and Noriega has barely stopped working since.

Two films with Amenábar

'Tesis' is a thriller about a student researching violence on screen who stumbles into a snuff film ring, and Noriega plays the classmate you are never quite sure about, opposite Ana Torrent and Fele Martínez.

The pair went straight into 'Open Your Eyes' (1997), in which he is César, a young man who loses his face in a car crash and then loses his grip on what is real. It brought his first Goya nomination for best actor, and Hollywood remade it four years later as 'Vanilla Sky', with Penélope Cruz playing the same part twice. Berlin named him a Shooting Star in 1999 and Cannes gave him its Chopard trophy for emerging talent in 2001, shared that year with Audrey Tautou.

The villain years

What he did with the leading man label was spend a decade playing unpleasant men. The one most people outside Spain know is Jacinto, the caretaker with a grudge in Guillermo del Toro's 'The Devil's Backbone' (2001), set in an orphanage during the Spanish Civil War with Marisa Paredes and Federico Luppi.

The year before he had gone to Argentina for 'Plata quemada', Marcelo Piñeyro's film about two bank robbers and lovers on the run, with Leonardo Sbaraglia. He worked with Piñeyro again on 'The Method' (2005), a job interview that turns into a trap.

In between he played Mikel Lejarza, the real informer who infiltrated ETA, in 'El lobo' (2004), which earned a second Goya nomination, and a scheming count in 'Alatriste' (2006) opposite Viggo Mortensen. In 'Lolita's Club' (2007) he played twin brothers, one a violent policeman and the other a man with a learning disability.

Working in English

2008 took him abroad twice. 'Vantage Point' retold an assassination attempt eight times over, with Dennis Quaid, Forest Whitaker and Ben Kingsley.

Better was 'Transsiberian', Brad Anderson's claustrophobic thriller aboard the train across Russia, where he shares a compartment with Woody Harrelson and Emily Mortimer and is not what he seems.

Then came 'Blackthorn' (2011), a Bolivian western with Sam Shepard as an ageing Butch Cassidy, and 'The Last Stand' (2013), in which he is the escaped cartel boss being chased by Arnold Schwarzenegger in Kim Jee-woon's American debut.

Spain, and then zombies

Back home he loosened up, doing ensemble comedy in 'A Gun in Each Hand' (2012) and 'Perfectos desconocidos' (2017), and taking television seriously for the first time with 'La sonata del silencio' (2016), Netflix's 'Hache' alongside Adriana Ugarte, and 'Inés del alma mía' (2020), where he is the conquistador Pedro de Valdivia.

The genuine surprise arrived in September 2025. He joined 'The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon' for a third series shot entirely in Spain, across Galicia, Aragón, Catalonia and Valencia. He plays Antonio, who becomes Carol's love interest, opposite Norman Reedus and Melissa McBride, with Óscar Jaenada also in the cast. He has said he turned it down twice before saying yes, and he returns for the fourth and final series.

The following month he was back in Spanish cinemas with the thriller 'Parecido a un asesinato' opposite Blanca Suárez, and in April 2026 with 'La ahorcada', a ghost story from Miguel Ángel Lamata in which he is a possessive man haunted by the woman he humiliated. He and Amaia Salamanca, who plays the ghost, described it as a film about toxic relationships wearing a horror costume.

He says almost nothing about his private life and has been consistent about it for decades. He met Trinidad Oteros in 2005 at Madrid airport, both waiting on a delayed flight, and they married on 8 February 2011 at a district register office in the city, so quietly that the press found out afterwards. They have a daughter, born about three years later. Oteros has no connection to the film business and has always preferred to stay out of view.

Thirty years after Amenábar worried he was just a handsome face, he is being introduced to a large American audience as the man Carol falls for. Not a bad second act, is it?