Asier Etxeandía

Asier Gómez Etxeandía (born 27 June 1975) is a Spanish film actor and singer, whose career includes television, theater and film performances. He is best known for his character as Raúl de la Riva in Velvet and Velvet Colección and for Pain and Glory (2019), for which he was nominated for Goya Award for Best Supporting Actor.

Asier Etxeandía studied acting at a Biscayan school, of which he only keeps fond memories of two teachers, Eguzki Zubia and Juan Carlos Garaizabal. He recently commented on its beginnings, noting that "when you are 19 years old, you trust your teachers to the end and sometimes they are not qualified, but in need of your admiration. I believed in them and they almost drove me crazy. They play with personal things, it is dangerous. I learned a lot about what not to do, how not to behave in this profession. The actor complained about the teachers who criticized the students who appeared on TV. He remembers a teacher who cut a boy's hair because she did not like his performance. "They had our brains so drained that we were delighted with that wonderful ritual," he sentenced.

Asier Etxeandia left the Basque Country when he settled in Madrid at the age of twenty. In the capital he came to work as a manager of a sex shop while he was studying acting. He went to the program Uno para todos, (Telecinco) in 1995, presented by Goyo González, as a contestant. The Globomedia production company hired him during the first season of One Step Ahead, where he played Beni, a homosexual who entered an arts academy with the hope of becoming an actor. Asier left the series because he feared possible typecasting. In spite of everything, he recognized that his work there opened doors for him and he met his first friends in the capital, including Natalia Millán.

Natalia Millán thought of him to star in the musical Cabaret offering him the role of Master of Ceremonies, the one in charge of commenting ironically on the events that take place in Germany in the 1930s . Manuel Bandera and Emilio Alonso León also worked on this montage . During the performance, Asier brought out members of the audience chosen at random, whom he put in trouble on stage. In order to carry out his work, Asier moved away from the interpretation that Joel Gray carried out in the film to be able to make his own creation, without thereby giving up the playful, ill-intentioned and captivating character of the character.

He was cast in Pedro Almodóvar's Broken Embraces, playing a small role as a blind waiter, which was not included in the final cut, but whose scene is part of the additional content of the film on DVD.

Asier is openly gay.[citation needed ]