Hugo Silva

British audiences have most likely met him on a plane. In I'm So Excited (2013), Pedro Almodóvar's farce set in business class, Hugo Silva is one of the passengers. The year before he had robbed a gold-buying shop dressed as a silver Jesus in Witching & Bitching. In Spain he is something rather bigger: a television face for two decades and, lately, a considerably better actor than people expected.

He was born Rafael Hugo Fernández Silva in Madrid on 10 May 1977, in San Blas, out on the eastern edge of the city. Before acting he sang in a thrash metal band called Inordem and took singing and guitar lessons.

He trained at a couple of Madrid drama schools and got into RESAD, the city's main conservatoire, without finishing the course. There was some stage work, and then television took him.

Spanish television in the 1990s and 2000s worked a bit like repertory theatre: you turned up every week for years and learned in front of several million people. That is where he was trained, whatever the drama schools had planned for him.

Ten years of television first

His first long job was Al salir de clase, the Telecinco teen serial that trained half a generation of Spanish actors. He was in it from 2000 to 2002 and made 269 episodes, which tells you how the trade was learned back then.

'Paco y Veva' for TVE followed, and then, in 2005, the job that changed everything. In Los hombres de Paco he played Lucas Fernández, the good-looking detective at a Madrid police station, in a comedy-drama that ran until 2010, became a genuine national habit and was revived in 2021 with him back in it.

It ran from October 2005 to May 2010 and was one of the defining Spanish series of its decade, the kind whose catchphrases outlived it. When Antena 3 revived it in 2021, eleven years on, Silva was among the returning cast.

It made him famous and, for a while, made him the same offer over and over.

De la Iglesia, Almodóvar and a run of black comedies

Film took him on slowly. He got a proper start in Queens (2005), then did The Sandman (2007) and the teen hit Sex, Party and Lies (2009).

Those years were busy and fairly repetitive. He was the convict turning drug dealer in Guts (2009), opposite Carmen Machi, and the lead in Lo contrario al amor (2011) with Adriana Ugarte.

Two very different directors changed the picture. Oriol Paulo put him in The Body (2012), the thriller about a corpse that vanishes from a morgue, and Álex de la Iglesia cast him in 'Witching & Bitching' (2013), which got him a Feroz nomination.

The same year Pedro Almodóvar put him on that plane. He worked with De la Iglesia again on My Great Night (2015) and went into horror with Shrew's Nest (2014), alongside Macarena Gómez.

Comedies kept coming too, among them To Hell with the Ugly (2010) and 70 Big Ones (2018), Koldo Serra's Bilbao bank-robbery farce.

He filled the later 2010s with whatever was going: the con man in El intercambio (2017), a Falangist officer in Sordo (2018), and the Spanish voice of Dug in Aardman's Early Man (2018).

Pacino

In 2016 he joined El Ministerio del Tiempo, the cult TVE series about a government department that polices time travel, as Jesús Méndez Pontón, known as Pacino: a policeman from the 1980s dropped into the present day with no idea what is going on.

The series has an unusually devoted following well beyond Spain, and Pacino became one of its most quoted characters: an eighties cop who mostly solves problems by shouting at them and who spends the rest of the time baffled by mobile phones.

It is also the sort of part that tends not to come the way of actors hired for their looks, which is roughly the point at which the second half of his career begins.

The part won him the Feroz Award for best supporting actor in a series in 2017, still the main prize on his shelf. He stayed until the final season in 2020.

Television has never stopped using him since, and rarely for the same thing twice: the detective in Brigada Costa del Sol (2019), the Russian-mafia comedy Nasdrovia (2020) and an eighteenth-century nobleman in La cocinera de Castamar (2021).

In 2023 he did two more, Fleeting Lies for SkyShowtime and the black comedy Headless Chickens. The following year brought Marbella, a Movistar Plus+ thriller about dirty money on the Costa del Sol in which he plays César Beltrán. A second season arrived this year.

He also kept a foot in mainstream comedy throughout, in films like Tenemos que hablar (2016), and took the occasional smaller drama, among them Faro (2023).

The serious turn

The shift in how people saw him came late, and came from Isabel Coixet. In Un amor (2023), her adaptation of Sara Mesa's novel with Laia Costa, he is Píter, the manipulative village hippie who does everyone favours nobody asked for. It brought his first Goya nomination, for supporting actor, in 2024.

Since then he has mixed things up: fathers in Buscando a Coque (2024) and Desmontando a Lucía (2024), then in 2025 the ensemble comedy Un funeral de locos and La buena suerte for Gracia Querejeta.

He has had two releases this year. Un hijo, out in Spanish cinemas on 8 May and on Movistar Plus+ since September, is Nacho La Casa's film of an Alejandro Palomas novel about an eight-year-old with a secret, with Macarena García.

The other is Cada día nace un listo, Arantxa Echevarría's black comedy, with Silva as a washed-up talent show contestant hired to steal a painting.

What he does and doesn't talk about

Spanish critics who had spent a decade filing him under handsome television lead started writing about him differently after 'Un amor'. Píter is a genuinely unpleasant creation, helpful in a way that leaves you in his debt, and Silva plays him without asking the audience to like him.

He says very little about his private life. He has twin sons born in January 2010 and has always kept their mother's identity out of the press, which the Spanish gossip magazines have never stopped picking at and he has never bothered to settle. Since 2017 he has been with the actress Marta Guerras.

About the work he is more forthcoming, and less self-pitying than you might expect. He says being typecast never troubled him and that he is grateful to have worked as much as he has, though he concedes that leading-man parts don't tend to come with many contradictions attached.

He has also admitted taking jobs simply because nothing else was on the table, and says he doesn't regret it. What has changed, by his account, is the quality of what now reaches him. Asked why he works so relentlessly, he once answered that he has a mortgage and two children, which is a less romantic explanation than most actors give and probably the true one.

The earliest credit MovieNCo has for Hugo Silva is Al salir de clase (2000); in all, 32 films and 10 TV shows over 26 years. Their title most voted by MovieNCo readers is Paco's Men (2005), with 292 votes. Their busiest decade is the 2010s, with 22 titles. The person they have worked with most is Santiago Segura, on 5 films, among them Witching & Bitching and My Great Night.