Ester Expósito

Watch what Ester Expósito does when nobody in the scene is talking to her. In Drawn Together (2026) she plays Marfil, a rich man's daughter with a bodyguard she is not meant to want, and for the first half hour she does almost nothing: she watches, she waits, and the face gives away only that she is thinking. David Acereto's camera likes that face and so did we. Then the film starts cutting away from it to show another car arriving at another gate, and it never really comes back. We waited for the kiss to cost her something, and when it arrived we found ourselves admiring how well lit it was. That is not her fault. She had been holding the tension for an hour and Óscar Pedraza's film let go of it for her.

The career so far has been a long walk away from the part that made her. She began with small television roles in 2016 and 2017, and then Carla in Elite (2018–2020) brought her an audience well beyond Spain and, with it, a reputation for being looked at rather than watched: the attention fixed on her appearance and on the show's bedrooms, not on the acting. She has answered that with her choices. By her own decision she has not filmed a sex scene since Elite, and the roles since have been women who do things rather than women things are done to: the horror leads in Venus (2022) and The Wailing (2024), a lead with two names in the Mexican adventure series Bandidos (2024–2025), and Marfil, a part that asks more of her body than of her face. We have not reviewed the horror films and will not judge them here, but the direction of travel is plain.

What we have seen ourselves is Drawn Together, and the evidence there is that she can hold a shot and the film cannot. She prepares hard for the physical work and it shows in how she carries herself through a room she does not trust. Around her, Elixabet Nuñez changed her wardrobe more often than the script changed her mind, Luis Almau's score told us what she felt a beat before she was allowed to feel it, and Antonio Frutos cut her fights so neatly that the effort she put into them left no mark. Our score for the film was 44 and the actors were not the reason.

The risk in a face like hers is that watchfulness becomes a manner. Stillness is only worth anything when we can see what it costs, and a script that never asks her to lose it will make her look merely poised. She has worked with Jaume Balagueró, who made [REC], and horror is the sensible place for her to be, because it is a genre that films people waiting for something and then makes the wait pay. We would like to see her with a director who trusts her enough to hold the shot ten seconds longer than is comfortable. Pedraza held it for five and cut to the cars.