Eduard Fernández

In Che: Part Two (2008), the guerrillas dig in on a Bolivian farm and the man next door comes to have a look at them. Eduard Fernández plays Ciro Algarañaz, the neighbour, who decides that these strangers must be making cocaine, and acts on it, which does them no good at all. We laughed, in a film that does not go looking for laughs, because Fernández plays it straight, as a sensible man reaching a sensible conclusion. It is a small part and it is the sort of thing he does well: a man with his own ideas who is not in the story to serve anyone else's.

He came to film late. He trained in mime at the Institut del Teatre in Barcelona, worked with the theatre company Els Joglars, and did not make a feature until Souvenir (1994), when he was thirty. Washington Wolves (1999) got him noticed and Fausto 5.0 (2001), as Santos Vella, made him a lead. Then came a run of bigger international productions, Che for Steven Soderbergh and Biutiful (2010) for Alejandro González Iñárritu, both in support.

Biutiful shows what a supporting actor cannot do in a film already carrying too much. Fernández is Tito, brother to Javier Bardem's Uxbal, who has cancer, and Tito has been sleeping with Uxbal's ex-wife. That is a whole film's worth of betrayal, and Iñárritu fits it in among the raids, the sweatshop and the ghosts. Fernández has worked with Bardem three times, and here the two of them get almost no room together. It is not his fault; nobody in that film except Bardem gets room.

The reputation at home rests on work we have not reviewed. In the last decade he has taken the lead in a run of parts drawn from Spanish history and Spanish scandal: Francisco Paesa, the spy and fixer, in Smoke & Mirrors (2016); Millán-Astray, founder of the Spanish Legion, in While at War (2019); Enric Marco, the impostor, in Marco, the Invented Truth (2024); and Manolo Vital in The 47 (2024). Critics in Spain note that he changes his body for these men and plays their contradictions without telling you what to think of them. He has said as much: "Nunca juzgo a mis personajes, sino que trato de entender sus razones", never judge the characters, try to understand their reasons. Actors say this often. On the evidence of Algarañaz, whose reasoning is wrong and entirely his own, he seems to mean it.

So our view is partial, and we say so. We have seen him at the edge of two films by American directors, doing what was asked and, once, rather more. The parts that made his name are the ones we have yet to write up. Start with Che: Part Two, which is the better film and gives him the better scene, and watch for the farmer.