A physical actor by training who came to the screen late and was asked, on arrival, to keep still. When a director gives him a reason to hold back he is worth watching; when a script gives him only a glower, a glower is what we get.
Fi1m perspective
In Drawn Together (2026) Pablo Molinero plays Alejandro Cortés, a man in the gangster strand of a romance, and for most of his time on screen he glowers. It is a good glower, and there is plainly an actor behind it waiting for a scene. The scene does not come. Sofía Cuenca's screenplay gives that strand guns and reasons for two people to be alone in a car, and gives Cortés nothing to say that he did not have to. We kept watching him for a flicker of something private, and by the end we were faintly cross on his behalf, because the film was wasting a face that could do more.
The face was built on stage. Molinero came out of street theatre and physical performance companies in Valencia and Barcelona, co-founded the company Los Corderos in 2003, and took small screen parts from the middle of that decade. The turn came with La peste (2018), as Mateo Núñez, under Alberto Rodríguez, and his own account of it is the most useful thing we know about him: "Me pedía mucha contención, pero con enjundia. Yo vengo del teatro físico, algo muy expresivo. Y él me pedía mesura hasta en los gestos." Rodríguez wanted restraint, but restraint with something inside it, down to the smallest gesture. That is the whole problem of his screen career in one sentence, and he knew it in 2018.
Since then he has worked steadily in Spanish film and television, in El verano que vivimos (2020), The Chalk Line (2022) and A Private Affair (2022), mostly in supporting and character parts in thrillers and period pieces rather than leads. He has said he prefers roles far from ordinary life, parts he can build with costume, movement and space. The reputation at home is quiet and good, and there is not much detailed criticism of him to argue with.
We have seen too little of him to say more than this. A body trained to fill a stage is being asked, film after film, to do less, and the question each time is whether anyone has told him what the less is for. Rodríguez did. Pedraza, on the evidence of Drawn Together, did not, and stillness with no purpose behind it reads as sulking. He needs a director who asks him to hold back and a script that gives him something worth hiding. He has had the first at least once; the second is overdue.
Biography
Pablo Molinero is a Spanish actor. He was born in 1977 in Castelló de la Plana and studied English Philology at the Universitat Jaume I, where he first engaged with theatre. He later studied interpretation and dance in Barcelona.
Molinero began his professional career in street theatre companies including Visitants, Comediants and La Fura dels Baus. He is a founder, with David Climent, of the company Los Corderos. His screen roles include Mateo Núñez in the series The Plague (2018–2019), Hernán in El verano que vivimos (2020), Simón in The Chalk Line (2022) and Alejandro Cortés in Drawn Together (2026).
