Elena Anaya
Elena Anaya is an actor, born 1975.
Anaya became a name in Spain with Sex and Lucia in 2001, which brought her a Goya nomination for Best Supporting Actress, and she spent the following decade moving between Spanish cinema and international productions without ever fully committing to either. Talk to Her gave her a small part in a major film; Van Helsing made her one of Dracula's brides for a Hollywood paycheque; Fragile and Captain Alatriste kept her working at home.
The Skin I Live In in 2011 is the dividing line. She won the Goya for Best Actress for it, and the performance is a genuinely difficult piece of work: a character who spends the film being looked at, controlled and studied, and who has to be simultaneously passive and calculating without the script ever letting her explain herself. Very few actors could hold an audience in that position for two hours.
Since then the international parts have been better but not necessarily bigger. Doctor Poison in Wonder Woman is played from behind a prosthetic mask, which leaves her half a face and a voice to build a character with, and she does more with it than the film asks. The Infiltrator, Point Blank and Mesrine use her as a European thriller presence. The recent Spanish work, including The Chalk Line and Rifkin's Festival, is where the leading roles still are.
Movies (25)
- Room in Rome (2010)
- Van Helsing (2004)
- Wonder Woman (2017)
- The Skin I Live In (2011)
- Rosebush Pruning (2026)
- Sex and Lucía (2001)
- Swung (2015)
- Savage Grace (2007)
- The Infiltrator (2016)
- Fragile (2005)
- Talk to Her (2002)
- In the Land of Women (2007)
- Mesrine: Killer Instinct (2008)
- Captain Alatriste: The Spanish Musketeer (2006)
- Inheritance
- Rifkin’s Festival (2020)
- The Chalk Line (2022)
- They Are All Dead (2014)
- Dead Fish (2005)
- Don't Tempt Me (2001)
- The Blue Room (2002)
- Zip & Zap and the Captain's Island (2016)
- The Summit (2017)
- Cairo Time (2009)
- Point Blank (2010)
TV (3)
Where to start with Elena Anaya
The Skin I Live In is the one, and the single best piece of advice is to go in knowing nothing about it. Anaya is extraordinary in it, and the less you have read the better the performance works.
Before or after, Talk to Her shows the same director in a gentler mood and gives her an early, smaller role in a much warmer film. Sex and Lucía is the breakthrough and still worth seeing for how much presence she has with very little dialogue.
Room in Rome is the most exposed thing she has done, essentially a two-hander in a single hotel room across one night, and it holds together only because of her. For the international side, Wonder Woman is the widest-seen work and a lesson in acting through a mask, Van Helsing is pure camp, and The Infiltrator is the best of the thrillers.