Malena Alterio

Info

Full Name: Malena Alterio
Date of birth: January 21, 1974 (52 years old)
Location: Buenos Aires
Country: Argentina

Malena Alterio has been active for 23 years, participating in 23 movies that average a 5.7/10 score.

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Tráiler en VOSE de 'Harry Potter' T1

Biography

In 2004 Malena Alterio walked onto the stage at the Goya Awards with her brother to hand their father a lifetime achievement Goya. Twenty years later she walked on alone to collect the one for best actress. It was the first competitive Goya anyone in the Alterio family had won.

Buenos Aires, exile and a Madrid drama school

She was born in Buenos Aires on 21 January 1974 and was still a baby when the family left for Madrid. Her father, the actor Héctor Alterio, had been threatened with death by the Triple A death squads and did not go back to Argentina for years. Her mother, Ángela Bacaicoa, is a psychologist, and her brother Ernesto Alterio is also an actor.

She trained for four years at Cristina Rota's school in Madrid while finishing secondary school, and also studied classical and contemporary dance and singing. Half a generation of Spanish actors came through that school, her brother included.

Belén

She made her film debut in 2000 in 'El palo', directed by Eva Lesmes, as a small-time thief in a gang of women robbing a bank. It brought a Goya nomination for best new actress.

What made her a household face in Spain was something else. Between 2003 and 2006 she played Belén in 'Aquí no hay quien viva', the Antena 3 sitcom about the residents of a central Madrid apartment block that became a genuine national phenomenon. She made 91 episodes of it and won a Unión de Actores award in 2004.

Brief spells followed on 'La que se avecina' (2007) and the Spanish version of 'Pulseras rojas'.

Bitter comedy in small doses

Her film career was built out of modest pictures and parts as exhausted women, which is where she is best. She was in 'Torremolinos 73' (2003), 'Casual Day' (2007) and 'Semen, a Love Sample' (2005), which put her on screen with both her father and her brother.

Her first lead came with 'One Word from You' (2008), from the Elvira Lindo novel, as one of two street sweepers, and she followed it with 'Five Square Meters' (2011), about a couple swindled over an off-plan flat during the crash.

She has done the commercial end too, as the mother in 'Perdiendo el norte' (2015) and its sequel 'Perdiendo el este' (2019), plus ensemble comedies like 'Road to Santiago' (2009), 'Born to Suffer' (2009) and 'Bajo terapia' (2023).

The part that brought the critics back was Nuria in 'Vergüenza' (2017-2020), a Movistar+ comedy about a couple incapable of escaping their own social awkwardness. It won her a Fotogramas de Plata in 2017 and the Feroz Award for best actress in a series in 2018.

Alongside all of it she has kept up a demanding stage career: Chekhov in 'Uncle Vanya', Brecht in 'Mother Courage and Her Children', which won her another Fotogramas de Plata in 2010, and productions with Claudio Tolcachir and Daniel Veronese.

Something Is About to Happen

In 2023 came the film that changed things. In 'Que nadie duerma', directed by Antonio Méndez Esparza from a Juan José Millás novel, she plays Lucía, a computer programmer who loses her job, fixates on a neighbour and becomes a taxi driver in order to look for him around Madrid.

It is a performance held together by silences, and it swept the board: the Goya and the Feroz for best actress in 2024, plus the CEC medal and the Unión de Actores prize.

She was fifty, with twenty-four years of work behind her. Her acceptance speech went to her fellow nominees and to people who have been working a long time without anyone noticing.

Now, and the family

She has not stopped since. In 2024 she released 'Mala persona' and 'Odio el verano', and led the Prime Video series 'En fin'.

Her most recent work is 'Cochinas', the comedy Prime Video released on 24 April 2026 after a screening at the Málaga Film Festival. She plays Nines, a 1990s housewife who ends up working in an adult video shop and sheds a fair few of her own prejudices along the way. She joined the production replacing Elena Anaya, who left before filming.

She says very little about her private life. She spent fifteen years with the actor and theatre director Luis Bermejo, marrying in the mid-2000s and separating around 2017. They stayed friends and later worked together onstage again. She has since said she isn't especially interested in a steady relationship and that she'll know if somebody turns up.

On 13 December 2025 her father died in Madrid at 96, half a century after arriving in the city he had fled to. She and Ernesto were the ones who said goodbye to him, in much the same roles they had held at that awards ceremony twenty-one years earlier: Héctor Alterio's two children, who both ended up doing what he did.