Pedro Alonso: The Man Behind Berlin in Money Heist

Pedro Alonso was forty-six when Berlin, the character he played in Money Heist, became one of the most talked-about villains on television, and the age matters because Alonso had already lived several acting lives by then. He was born on 21 June 1971 in Vigo, a port city in Galicia in north-west Spain, and he grew up in a region with its own language, Galician, its own television and its own theatre, far from the Madrid casting rooms where most Spanish stars are made. For more than twenty years he worked in Galician television, in theatre and in Spanish film, taking the kind of parts that build an actor without making him famous, and when Money Heist arrived in 2017 he brought all of that experience to a character who needed it: Berlin is charming, cruel, funny and frightening, often in the same scene, and only an actor with long practice could hold those qualities together without the character falling apart.

Vigo, 1971: A Childhood in Galicia

Vigo is a fishing port on the Atlantic coast of Galicia, a city of shipyards, canneries and rain, and Alonso was born there in 1971, when Spain was still under Franco and Galicia was a place that Madrid often overlooked. He grew up speaking Galician as well as Spanish, in a culture that has its own music, its own literature and its own sense of being different from the rest of Spain, and that background stayed with him. Galician actors of his generation often began their careers in Galician television, because the regional channel TVG produced drama in Galician and gave local actors their first jobs, and Alonso’s early career followed that path. The regional beginning matters, because it meant that he learned to act in a language and a tradition that was not the mainstream, and that he developed a sense of himself as an actor before he ever had to please a national audience.

The port city also gave him something else: a sense of the world as a place of movement and departure. Vigo’s ships leave for the Atlantic and come back with fish, and the city’s history is a history of emigration, of Galicians leaving for America and for Europe, and of families waiting for news. Alonso’s later characters are often men who are leaving or arriving, who are charming strangers in a room full of people who know each other, and Berlin is the clearest example: he walks into the Mint, takes charge, and behaves as if he has always belonged there, even though he is the most dangerous man in the room. That ease with being an outsider is a Galician skill, learned in a place that has always looked outward to the sea, and Alonso carries it into every role.

Training in Madrid and the Theatre Years

Alonso studied acting at the Real Escuela Superior de Arte Dramático (RESAD) in Madrid, one of Spain’s most demanding drama schools, where students spend years on voice, movement, classical text and contemporary theatre. RESAD is not a finishing school for celebrities; it is a conservatory, and its graduates leave with a technical foundation that shows in their work for the rest of their lives. Alonso also studied dance and theatre in a serious way, and the physical training matters for Berlin, a character who moves with a dancer’s confidence, who gestures, who takes up space, who treats a robbery as if it were a performance. The body is part of the acting, and Alonso’s body on screen is always doing something: leaning, turning, smiling, threatening, and the training is visible in every gesture.

After drama school he worked in theatre, as most RESAD graduates do, and theatre taught him the two things that Berlin needs most: timing and nerve. Timing, because a joke that lands a second late is not a joke, and Berlin’s humour is all timing, a smile that arrives just before the cruelty. Nerve, because a stage actor has no second take, and Berlin is a character who never shows fear, who walks into a room full of armed police and behaves as if he owns it. Alonso’s theatre years were not famous years, and they left few recordings, but they were the years in which he learned to trust his instincts in front of a live audience, and that trust is what makes Berlin feel dangerous rather than rehearsed.

Galician Television: Rías Baixas and Padre Casares

Before he was known in Spain, let alone abroad, Alonso was a familiar face on Galician television. He appeared in Rías Baixas, a TVG series set in the Galician coast, and in Maridos e mulleres, a Galician comedy-drama, and those early roles gave him a regional audience and a working life. Galician television in the 2000s was a small world, with small budgets and loyal viewers, and an actor who worked there learned to do a lot with a little: to play a scene in one take, to work with a small crew, to trust the writing. Alonso did that work for years, and it gave him a steadiness that shows in his later performances, a sense that he is never hurrying, never pushing, never trying too hard to be noticed.

His longest Galician commitment was Padre Casares, the TVG series in which he played a priest in a small Galician village, and the role ran for years, from 2008 onwards. Playing a priest in a village comedy is about as far from Berlin as an actor can get, and that is the point: Alonso’s range was built in regional television, where he played ordinary men, funny men, kind men, long before anyone asked him to play a villain. Padre Casares made him a household name in Galicia, and it taught him how to sustain a character over many episodes, how to keep an audience coming back, and how to be patient with a role. When Money Heist cast him as Berlin, the producers were not hiring a young villain; they were hiring an actor who had spent a decade playing a priest, and who knew how to make an audience love a character and then fear him.

Gran Hotel and the Move to National Television

The step from Galician television to national Spanish television came with Gran Hotel, the Antena 3 period drama in which Alonso played Diego Murquía, the manager of a grand hotel in 1905, from 2011 to 2013. Gran Hotel was a hit in Spain and abroad, a handsome, expensive-looking series with a large cast, and Diego was a villain of a different kind from Berlin: a cold, ambitious man who would do anything to protect his position. The role proved that Alonso could play a villain in a mainstream series, that he could hold his own against a large ensemble, and that his face, with its sharp features and its easy smile, could turn frightening in a single look. It also introduced him to a national audience that had never watched Galician television, and it made him a recognisable name in Spain.

Gran Hotel mattered for another reason: it taught Alonso how to work in a big production. The costumes, the sets, the period detail and the large cast all demanded a different kind of discipline from Galician television, and Alonso adapted to it without losing the stillness that had made him good in smaller shows. Diego Murquía is a man who controls a hotel the way Berlin controls a heist, by knowing everything and everyone, and the two characters share a quality: they are both men who believe that the rules do not apply to them. Alonso played Diego for three seasons, and by the time the series ended he was no longer a regional actor; he was a Spanish television actor with a national profile, waiting for the role that would take him further.

Berlin: The Villain Who Stole Money Heist

Money Heist, created by Álex Pina, first aired on Antena 3 in 2017, and Alonso was cast as Andrés de Fonollosa, known as Berlin, the Professor’s brother and the field commander of the gang inside the Royal Mint. Berlin is the most complicated character in the series: he is dying of a degenerative disease, he is charming and funny, he is cruel and violent, and he is the only member of the gang who truly enjoys the robbery. Alonso plays him with a smile that never quite reaches his eyes, and the performance works because the audience can never decide whether to like him or fear him, and often does both at once. The character was originally meant to die at the end of the second part, and he does, but the audience loved him so much that the producers brought him back in flashbacks for the rest of the series, and then gave him his own spin-off.

The international success of Money Heist on Netflix turned Berlin into a global figure. Fans dressed as Berlin, quoted his lines, debated his morality, and argued about whether he was a villain or a hero, and Alonso, who was forty-six when the show began, became famous in a way that his twenty years of work had never made him. The fame was strange because Berlin is not a likeable man: he orders a murder, he is violent toward women, he is arrogant and selfish, and yet the audience loved him, and the reason is Alonso’s performance. He plays Berlin as a man who knows he is dying and has decided to enjoy every minute that is left, and that joy, even when it is cruel, is infectious. The character’s popularity was so great that Netflix commissioned Berlin, a prequel series released in December 2023, in which Alonso returned as a younger Berlin planning a heist in Paris, and the spin-off proved that the character could carry a show on his own.

The Berlin Spin-Off and Life After the Heist

Berlin, the Netflix spin-off, premiered in December 2023, and it is a different kind of show from Money Heist: it is lighter, more romantic, set in Paris, and it follows Berlin as he plans a theft of jewels, falls in love, and assembles a new gang. Alonso is the centre of it, and the series gave him the chance to play Berlin without the shadow of the Professor, to show the character’s charm, his humour and his appetite for life without the Mint’s violence. The show was a success for Netflix, and it confirmed that Alonso’s Berlin was not a one-series wonder but a character with a life of his own. The spin-off also showed a different side of Alonso: he is not just a villain, he is a leading man, and he can carry a series on his shoulders.

Alongside the spin-off, Alonso has continued to work in film and television in Spain, and he has also become known as a writer and an artist. In 2020 he published El libro de Filipo, a book that mixes autobiography, fiction and drawings, and the book revealed a different side of him: a man who thinks about his life, his family and his work in a reflective, sometimes poetic way. He is also a painter, and he has spoken about art as a way of thinking that is different from acting, a private activity that belongs to him alone. Those interests matter because they explain Berlin: the character is an artist as well as a criminal, a man who treats a robbery as a work of art, and Alonso, who is an artist himself, understands that instinct from the inside.

Writing, Painting and the Man Outside the Mask

Alonso’s life outside acting is deliberately private, and he has kept it that way even as his fame has grown. He is known to be a father, and he has spoken in interviews about the importance of his family and about the way fatherhood changed his view of his work, but he does not share his private life on social media. He writes, he paints, and he has said that those activities are a way of staying sane in a profession that can be chaotic and insecure. The book El libro de Filipo is the clearest evidence of that private life: it is a personal, digressive, illustrated book, not a celebrity memoir, and it shows a man who is interested in ideas, in memory and in the strange business of being watched by millions of people who know him as Berlin.

The painting matters too, because Alonso has talked about it as a practice that has nothing to do with fame. A painter works alone, makes mistakes in private, and shows the work only when it is ready, and that is the opposite of television, where everything is public and immediate. Alonso’s two lives, the public one as Berlin and the private one as a writer and painter, sit side by side, and the tension between them is part of what makes his performances interesting. Berlin is a man who performs for an audience, who needs to be watched, and Alonso, who also needs privacy, understands that need and that fear, and he plays Berlin as a man who is always performing, even when he is alone, because he does not know how to stop.

Diablo Guardián and the Work Beyond Spain

In 2018 Alonso starred in Diablo Guardián, an Amazon Prime Video series based on the novel by Xavier Velasco, in which he played Gallego, a man involved in the dangerous world of a young Mexican woman who has fled to New York. The series was an international production, filmed in English and Spanish, and it gave Alonso a different kind of role: not a villain in a heist, but a man in a thriller, a character whose charm is a weapon and whose motives are never quite clear. The show was not as famous as Money Heist, but it mattered for Alonso, because it proved that he could work in an international streaming production, in two languages, and hold his own in a story that was not Spanish. The role also showed the range that his Galician years had built: Gallego is a man who lives in the shadows, who makes his living from other people’s trouble, and Alonso plays him with the same ease that he brings to Berlin, the ease of a man who is comfortable being the most dangerous person in the room.

He has also worked in Spanish film, including La playa de los ahogados, released in English as The Beach of the Drowned, a 2015 crime film set in Galicia, in which he played a detective investigating a murder in a small fishing town. The film is a Galician story, set in the landscape Alonso comes from, and his presence in it is a reminder that he has never left Galicia behind. He has also appeared in the film The Silence of the Marsh, known in Spanish as El silencio del pantano, a 2019 crime thriller in which he played a writer who leads a double life as a serial killer. The role is another villain, and it is a darker one than Berlin, a man who kills without charm and without joy, and Alonso’s willingness to play it shows that he is not afraid of being disliked. The film was released on Netflix, and it gave international audiences another chance to see what Alonso can do when he is not wearing a Dalí mask.

The Art of the Villain: Why Berlin Works

Berlin works as a character because Alonso understands something about villains that many actors miss: a villain who knows he is a villain is boring, but a villain who believes he is an artist is fascinating. Berlin treats the heist as a work of art, he talks about it as if it were a painting or a piece of music, and he behaves as if the police, the hostages and the gang are all part of his audience. Alonso plays that belief without irony, and the audience believes it too, because he never winks at the camera, never lets the audience know that he is in on the joke. The result is a character who is terrifying and charming at the same time, and the terror and the charm come from the same place: Berlin’s absolute confidence that he is right, that his plan is beautiful, and that the world should admire it.

The death scene is the proof. At the end of the second part, Berlin stays behind in the tunnel while the gang escapes, and he holds off the police with a machine gun, singing and smiling, knowing that he is going to die. The scene is operatic, it is sentimental, it is over the top, and it works, because Alonso plays it as a man who has chosen his death, who has decided that this is how he wants to go, and who is enjoying the choice. He does not beg, he does not cry, he does not repent, and the audience, which knows that Berlin is a murderer, finds itself moved by his death, and then wonders why. The answer is Alonso: he makes Berlin’s death feel like the death of an artist, not the death of a criminal, and the audience mourns the artist even as it knows that the criminal deserved it. That is a performance, and it is one of the best villain performances on television.

Alonso’s Galician roots also show in the way he has handled the business of fame, which is to say that he has handled it by not handling it very much. He does not court the press, he does not live on social media, and he does not turn his private life into content, and that restraint is a Galician quality, a preference for doing the work and letting the work speak. The audience in Galicia knew him for years before the rest of the world did, and they knew him as a priest in a village comedy, as a detective in a fishing town, as a man who played ordinary people well, and that local knowledge is still the truest picture of him. The global fame is real, and it is deserved, but it is also a late addition to a career that was already complete, and Alonso seems to know that, which is why he treats the fame as a pleasant surprise rather than as the point of the work.

My Take:

The first thing to say about Pedro Alonso is that Berlin is a problem, and Alonso knows it. Berlin is a character who does terrible things, who orders a murder, who is violent, who is arrogant, and the audience loves him anyway, and that love is uncomfortable. Alonso’s performance is the reason for the discomfort, because he makes Berlin charming, and the charm is real, not a trick. He smiles, he jokes, he dances, he flirts, and the audience, watching at home, finds itself smiling back, and then catches itself and wonders what it is doing. That is a difficult thing to act, because it requires the actor to be likeable and frightening at the same time, and Alonso does it by never apologising for Berlin, never softening him, never asking the audience to forgive him. The character is what he is, and the audience has to deal with that, and the fact that the audience chose to love him says as much about the audience as it does about Alonso.

The second thing is the age. Alonso was forty-six when Money Heist began, and Berlin is a man who knows he is dying, and the two facts belong together. A younger actor would have played Berlin as a young villain, all energy and cruelty, but Alonso plays him as a man who has lived, who has made his choices, who knows that time is short and has decided to spend it well. The performance has a kind of autumnal quality, a sense that the character is enjoying the last light of the day, and that quality comes from an actor who has himself lived long enough to know what it means to be running out of time. The spin-off, Berlin, which follows a younger Berlin in Paris, is interesting precisely because Alonso is now older than the character he is playing, and he plays the youth of the character with a knowledge of what is coming, which gives the lightness of the spin-off a shadow that the audience can feel even when the show is being funny.

The third thing is the Galician beginning, and how it shaped the actor. Alonso learned his craft in a small world, in Galician television, in theatre, in roles that nobody outside Galicia saw, and that small world taught him to be patient, to be precise, to trust the writing and to trust the audience. The actors who come from big cities and big schools often learn to perform for a crowd, but Alonso learned to perform for a room, for a small audience that knows him, and that intimacy is visible in Berlin. Berlin is a man who performs for a room, for the gang, for the hostages, for the police, and he does it with the confidence of a man who has performed in small rooms for years. The Galician years were not a delay; they were the training, and the proof is that when Alonso finally got a big stage, he did not need to learn how to use it.

The fourth thing is the voice and the body. Alonso’s Berlin moves like a dancer, and the movement is not an accident: he trained in dance and theatre, and he knows how to use his body to tell a story. Watch the way Berlin walks into a room, the way he turns, the way he leans against a wall, the way he uses his hands when he is explaining a plan. The body is always saying something, and what it is saying is that this man is in control, that he is not afraid, that he is enjoying himself. The voice does the same work: it is smooth, it is amused, it is never hurried, and it makes the audience listen. The combination of voice and body is what makes Berlin memorable, because the audience remembers the way he moved and the way he sounded long after it has forgotten the plot, and that memory is the actor’s, not the writer’s.

The fifth thing is the comparison with the Professor, and how Alonso holds his own against Álvaro Morte. The Professor is the brain, Berlin is the heart, or perhaps the nerve, and the two characters need each other. Morte plays the Professor with stillness, Alonso plays Berlin with movement, and the contrast is what makes the show work. The brothers are opposites, and the actors are opposites too, and the scenes in which they are together, especially the flashbacks in the later parts, are the best in the series, because the audience can see two different kinds of intelligence at work. Alonso does not try to out-think Morte; he out-feels him, he out-charms him, he out-dares him, and the result is a partnership that feels like a real family, with all the love and the rivalry that a real family contains.

The sixth thing is the book, El libro de Filipo, and what it reveals. A villain in a mask does not write a reflective, illustrated book about his life, but Alonso did, and the book is the clearest evidence that the actor is not the character. The book is personal, digressive, sometimes funny and sometimes sad, and it shows a man who thinks about his father, his family, his work and his fame in a way that Berlin never would. The fact that Alonso published it in 2020, at the height of his Money Heist fame, is interesting: he could have published a memoir about being Berlin, and it would have sold, but he published something stranger and more private, and that choice says that he values his inner life more than his fame. The audience that reads the book will find a different man from the one on screen, and that difference is the point.

The seventh thing is the painting, and the privacy that goes with it. Alonso paints, and he has spoken about painting as a private activity, a way of thinking that belongs to him alone. That privacy is important, because Berlin is a character who cannot be private, who performs all the time, who needs an audience, and Alonso, who needs privacy, understands the cost of that performance. The tension between the public actor and the private painter is the tension that makes Berlin interesting: the character is always on, always performing, always watched, and the actor knows what that costs, because he has lived it. The painting is not a hobby; it is a refuge, and the fact that Alonso protects it tells the audience that he knows the difference between being watched and being known.

The eighth thing is the morality of the character, and the question the audience has to answer for itself. Berlin orders a murder, he is violent, he is cruel, and yet the audience loves him, and the love is a problem that the show never quite solves. Alonso does not solve it either, and he should not, because the problem is the point. The audience loves Berlin because he is charming, because he is funny, because he is dying, because he is brave, and the audience has to decide whether those qualities excuse the cruelty. Alonso’s performance refuses to make the decision easy, and that refusal is the bravest thing about it. A lesser actor would have made Berlin either a monster or a hero, but Alonso makes him a man, and a man is harder to judge than a monster or a hero, and the audience is still arguing about him, which is the sign of a performance that matters.

The ninth thing, and the last, is what the career says about late fame. Alonso worked for twenty years before Money Heist, in Galicia, in theatre, in Gran Hotel, and he was a good actor for all of those years, and almost nobody outside Spain knew it. Then, at forty-six, he became famous, and the fame did not change the actor, it only changed the audience. The lesson is not that talent is always rewarded, because it often is not, but that the work is worth doing even when nobody is watching, because the work is what prepares a person for the moment when everybody is watching. Alonso’s Berlin is the proof: a performance that could only have been given by a man who had spent twenty years learning how to act, and who, when the moment came, was ready.

The death scene deserves a second look, because it is the scene that made Berlin immortal. Alonso plays it with a machine gun in his hands and a smile on his face, and the smile is the key: Berlin is not afraid, he is not angry, he is not even particularly sad, and the lack of fear is what makes the scene work. A man who is afraid of dying is a man the audience can pity, but a man who has chosen to die, who has decided that his death will be beautiful, is a man the audience can admire, and Alonso gives the audience that admiration without asking for it. The scene is also a piece of theatre, a man alone on a stage, performing for an audience of police officers who cannot see him, and Alonso, who learned his craft on stage, knows how to play a man alone on a stage. The death is not the end of Berlin, because the audience loved him too much to let him go, and the flashbacks and the spin-off are the proof, but the death is the moment when the character became a legend.

The Paris spin-off deserves its own thought, because it is a different show from Money Heist, and Alonso’s performance in it is different too. Berlin, the series, is lighter, it is romantic, it is set in Paris, and it follows a younger Berlin who is planning a jewel heist and falling in love, and Alonso plays him with a lightness that the original series never allowed. The lightness is a risk, because the audience loved Berlin for his darkness, and a lighter Berlin could have felt like a different character, but Alonso makes it work by keeping the charm and the confidence, and by letting the humour come forward. The spin-off proves that Berlin is not just a villain, he is a leading man, and that Alonso is not just a character actor, he is a star, and the proof is that the audience followed him to Paris without the Professor, without the Mint, without the red jumpsuits, and still wanted more.

The last thought is about the painter and the writer, and what they mean for the actor. Alonso paints and writes, and he has said that those activities are private, that they belong to him, and that they have nothing to do with fame. That privacy is the opposite of Berlin, who performs all the time, who needs to be watched, who cannot be alone, and the contrast is the most interesting thing about Alonso. The actor who plays the most public character on television is a private man who paints alone, and the private man understands the public character because he knows what it costs to be watched. The audience sees Berlin, and Alonso sees the cost, and the performance is built on that knowledge. The career, in the end, is a balance between the public and the private, between the mask and the man, and Alonso holds the balance with a steadiness that is rare, and that is why Berlin, a character who should have been a footnote, became the centre of the show.

One more quality deserves mention, and it is the generosity of the performance. Alonso gives Berlin to the audience without holding anything back, and he gives the other actors room to shine, which is why the ensemble scenes in Money Heist work so well. Berlin could easily have swallowed the show, because he is the loudest, funniest and most dangerous character in it, but Alonso never lets him swallow it; he plays Berlin as a man who needs the gang, who needs the Professor, who needs an audience, and that need makes him human. The generosity is the mark of a theatre actor, a man who knows that a scene belongs to everyone in it, and it is the reason that the other actors in Money Heist speak well of him. The villain who shares the stage is a rarer thing than the villain who steals it, and Alonso is the rarer kind.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Berlin in Money Heist?

Berlin, whose real name is Andrés de Fonollosa, is the Professor’s brother and the field commander of the gang inside the Royal Mint. Pedro Alonso played him from 2017, and the character became so popular that he returned in flashbacks and then in his own Netflix spin-off.

Where was Pedro Alonso born?

He was born on 21 June 1971 in Vigo, a port city in Galicia in north-west Spain, and he began his career in Galician television before moving to national Spanish television.

What is the Berlin spin-off on Netflix?

Berlin is a prequel series released on Netflix in December 2023, starring Pedro Alonso as a younger Berlin planning a jewel heist in Paris. It is lighter and more romantic than Money Heist and follows Berlin as he assembles a new gang.

What did Pedro Alonso do before Money Heist?

He worked for years in Galician television, including Rías Baixas and Padre Casares, and in theatre, and he played Diego Murquía in the Antena 3 period drama Gran Hotel from 2011 to 2013, which gave him a national audience in Spain.

What is El libro de Filipo?

El libro de Filipo is a book Pedro Alonso published in 2020, mixing autobiography, fiction and drawings. It is a personal, reflective work rather than a celebrity memoir, and it revealed his interests as a writer and artist.

Did Pedro Alonso study acting?

Yes, he studied at the Real Escuela Superior de Arte Dramático (RESAD) in Madrid, one of Spain’s most demanding drama schools, and he also trained in dance and theatre, which shaped the physical confidence of his performance as Berlin.