Sergi López has the face of a man who has never harmed anything, and he has spent more than thirty years letting directors use that against us. The villains are the famous part; the tired, decent men are the ones that stay with us.
Fi1m perspective
Capitán Vidal shaves with a straight razor. He does it carefully, in a mirror, in a mill he has turned into a garrison, and Sergi López plays the scene as if it were the most important thing the man will do all day. That is the López method, as far as he has one. He looks like somebody's uncle: round face, mild eyes, a build that suggests a good lunch rather than a gun. Then he speaks to the person he is about to hurt in the voice he would use to order dinner, and the horror is how ordinary he is.
He trained at the Lecoq school in Paris, which teaches actors to think with the body first, and it shows in how still he can be. His film career began in 1992 with the French director Manuel Poirier, who has cast him nine times; Western (1997) was the first of those to travel. Then Dominik Moll gave him Harry in With a Friend Like Harry... (2000), a charming man who turns out to be something else, and French cinema took to him as a villain with good manners. He went to England for Dirty Pretty Things (2002), playing a sleazy hotel man. Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth (2006) made the type famous everywhere.
The Vidal performance is why. López gives him no gap for feeling; the man has arranged his life so that none can get in. He questions a farmer and his son about a rabbit, and what he then does with a wine bottle made us look away, which we do not do often, and it was not the violence so much as the pace of it, unhurried, a chore being got through. He has said himself that his villains work because nobody would believe he had an ounce of malice in him, and that is right as far as it goes. The cost is that the public now thinks of him as the man with the bottle, when he has made more than a hundred films and most of them are not that.
Sirāt (2025) is the corrective. Oliver Laxe puts him in the sort of fleece a man packs for a weekend and sends him into a desert rave with his young son Esteban (Bruno Núñez) and a stack of flyers carrying his missing daughter's photograph. Luis is decent, tired and out of his depth, and López does almost nothing: he stands at the edge of the party, hands out the flyers, waits. The same stillness that made Vidal frightening makes Luis someone you want looked after, and when the ravers decide, without a word, to do exactly that, the film turns on his face. The quieter parts in between, Happy as Lazzaro (2018) among them, point the same way. Directors who want a monster know where to find him. The ones who want a father have been slower to call, and Sirāt suggests they should hurry.
Biography
Sergi López i Ayats is a Spanish actor born on 22 December 1965 in Vilanova i la Geltrú, Catalonia. He trained at the École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris and made his film debut in the early 1990s.
López has worked extensively in both Spanish and French cinema. He is known for roles in With a Friend Like Harry... (2000), for which he won the César Award for Best Actor, Dirty Pretty Things (2002), Pan's Labyrinth (2006) as Captain Vidal, and Rifkin's Festival (2020). He has also received a European Film Award.
In 2025 he appeared as Luis in Sirāt, directed by Óliver Laxe.
