María Pedraza: ‘Now that I’ve learned to tolerate and understand my anxiety, I feel like I know myself much better’

It was pure chance that María Pedraza passed by the Palafox cinema one afternoon, in December of 2021. The movie theater was showing The Matrix again, for the premiere of the fourth installment of the saga. The actress left the cinema obsessed with the Wachowski sisters. She set herself a challenge: to learn kickboxing to match Keanu Reeves’ skills.

“I’d been wanting to do an action project for a long time… and the time hadn’t come. Since it didn’t arrive, I thought that [learning kickboxing] wasn’t a bad way to attract it,” she laughs. Her hopes would become reality six months later. “They sent me the script for a thriller with touches of science fiction and – as I went through the tests – I knew it was what I had been waiting for.”

It didn’t take much testing for director Daniel Benmayor to turn her into Esther, a key piece in the film Awareness, which was released by Amazon Prime Video this past Tuesday. “María knows what this is about and she has great talent,” Benmayor emphasizes. “The character required a young woman with lots of physical control, to be able to master the fight choreographies, but also give them a special plasticity and visual effect. With her, it wasn’t even necessary to call in a stunt double.”

Despite her maturity and the strength she projects, in a scene where she had to kiss the protagonist (Carlos Scholz), she started to laugh nervously. Luckily, it went well with the moment in the film. This anecdote – told by the director – serves to frame the undeniable charm of Pedraza. In the last five years, she has become one of the most sought-after actresses in Spain and a muse for 11 million followers on social media. Pursued by photographers, brands and even successful singers (she has just appeared in a music video with Puerto Rican artist Myke Towers) she seems oblivious to the expectations that accompany her name.

“María has always been exactly what you see,” notes actor Pol Monen. “When we met in Amar (directed by Esteban Crespo, in 2017) I was 21 years old and she was 19. It was her first role, but she was still able to set limits when she didn’t feel comfortable. We had a sex scene in which she had to take off her clothes and show her breasts. She said she wouldn’t do it and the scene was dropped. Looking at [that experience] from a distance, it’s very powerful that a girl her age already had her criteria so clear,” Monen reflects. His career has continued to be intertwined with María, who is now his friend. “There’s something that’s never changed: how easy it is to work with her and the energy she brings to every place she goes.”

The young woman who appears on a terrace in Chamberí – a district of Madrid – on a September afternoon for her interview with EL PAÍS looks quite similar to the girl her colleague describes: clad in sportswear and with an ecstatic smile, she only seems insecure because of the brown dye that was done this morning. “I’m preparing a project with Daniel Calparsoro. I play a journalist. So, of course, I have to seem like a serious person,” she says sarcastically. The project is going to be a Netflix miniseries about the famous and high-profile robbery of the Central Bank of Barcelona in 1981. She shares the screen with Miguel Herrán (from Elite) and Hovik Keuchkerian (from Money Heist). This is the second work in which she’s been directed by Caparsoro. “When I finished [the last shoot], I improvised a well-deserved vacation. To act, you have to live, right? Well, I’m very much into living,” she concludes with laughter.

María grew up with her parents and her sister Celia in the Madrid neighborhood of Delicias. Dance could have been just another extracurricular activity if it weren’t for the fact that, in 2002 – when she turned six – a music program on television made her totally obsessed. “I learned all the choreography and asked my parents for the DVDs… but I didn’t expect them to take me so seriously when I told them I wanted to be a dancer,” she remembers. Her mother took her by the hand to the Mariemma Professional Conservatory, where she passed several tests, ranging from classical dance to improvising. Needless to say, she was admitted. “From the ages of 8 to 18 – instead of a normal school life – I had a routine of discipline and perseverance. Being a dancer implies a series of requirements: having a small chest was one of them. It was difficult for me to see my physical development occurring… I even used tape to hide it. Towards the end of my studies, I became very obsessed with food. I became extremely thin, obsessed with an extreme perfection that clearly doesn’t exist.”

Her eating disorder is – along with an accident she suffered shortly after – one of the most difficult moments she remembers from that time. “One afternoon, after arguing with my mother, I took the car with my sister and ended up with a broken fibula that put me in rehabilitation for eight months.” Only then did she heed the advice of her mother, who had told María on several occasions to sign up with fashion and film agencies, so as not to put all her eggs in one basket. Funnily enough, it was a modelling agent who got her her first role, in Amar (“to love”). Then, director Jota Linares signed her for her second feature film, Who Would You Take to a Desert Island? He ended up so convinced of her talent that he wanted to compensate for her unfulfilled dream of being a professional dancer. In her next film, Crystal Girls – a dark chronicle of the shadows of classical ballet – Pedraza played Irene, a professional dancer.

“She underwent intense training, without using a single stuntwoman in any of her scenes. On the last day, when we were filming, a toenail full of blood had to be pulled out of her, so that she could finish the scene. I can’t think of anyone as generous or self-demanding – I think it has to do with her class-consciousness. María may be very high up, but she knows what it takes to get here,” Linares says. If it weren’t for that opportunity, it’s likely that Pedraza would have looked for other job options. “I’d been unemployed for a year-and-a-half… I didn’t know what to do, so I will always be grateful to him for that.”

She has the same affection for Triana Martín, the lawyer she played in Toy Boy (2019), which was her first adult role. “I came from playing roles as a girl – like Marina in Elite or Alison Parker in Money Heist. I could have continued with that type of profile, or take a leap of no return,” she reflects. The series started off with negative reviews and poor ratings, but when it jumped to Netflix, it became a global phenomenon. “Many people laughed at how a girl went from studying at [a prep school] in Elite to wearing a suit. But it also served as a lesson for me to learn that other people’s opinions are just that: other people’s opinions.” She took on several other projects while simultaneously shooting for Toy Boy, but she did so without thinking about the next chapter. “I prepare well for things, I go with the flow and enjoy, because if I didn’t, anyone would notice just by looking at me on the screen. What I don’t do is worry too much about my career or my future.”

Nor does she worry too much about what people will say about her love for fashion (especially since luxury brands like Bulgari or Adolfo Domínguez have recently raved about it). Whether she has wavy bangs at the Cannes Festival, platinum blonde shine, or waist-length hair, each appearance that Pedraza makes on the red carpet is reproduced like crazy across the media.

“I’ve always really liked fashion. On a red carpet, I love to play and put my all into it. But in Spain it seems that, if you go too far into that territory, you’re taken less seriously as an actress. And I don’t really understand why they have to label me in one category or another. I know what my core is, but I’m not going to stop working with firms that I like just because of how someone is going to judge me.”

This could be one of the reasons why she’s thinking about living outside of Spain for a while, trying out for more mature roles… possibly even those linked to motherhood. “I would love to play a woman who’s pregnant, because it’s something I think about a lot lately. But hey, I still have a lot of life to live first,” she clarifies. “I love going horseback riding whenever I can, getting away for a weekend with friends, or giving it my all on a night out and going back to being a teenager for a while. Now that I’ve learned to tolerate and understand my anxiety, I feel like I know myself much better and I know how to listen to myself better.”

Pedraza is now heading to Miami, to participate in the promotional tour for Awareness. After that, life will be hers again. It has been a year marked by success on a professional level, although marked personally by the death of her father last June.

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