“I was 12 years old when I set foot on a stage for the very first time,” Spanish actor César Vicente says. “It was the year-end dance at my school. I realized [then] that performing would be part of my life; it allowed me to be confident in a way that I wasn’t before.” Chasing that sense of invincibility, Vicente enrolled in the dramatic arts program at Sevilla’s Viento Sur Teatro. Following four years of intensive training there, he soon began landing parts. These included the role of Elías, a clever groundskeeper at an all-girls finishing school, in the 2018 series A Different View, and a young Hernán Cortez, the Spanish imperialist who defeated the Aztecs, in the 2019 historical drama series Hernán.

Though each of those characters played a role in Vicente’s development, it was his role as Eduardo, a local laborer learning to read and write, in Pedro Almodóvar’s 2019 film Pain and Glory, that put him on the global map. “My experience as Eduardo was the most wonderful time of my life,” he says. “It was an opportunity to develop my hidden potential and to put into practice the skills I had learned in the Academy.”