Final 12 months, actress Penélope Cruz arrange a joint manufacturing enterprise, Moonlyon, with Madrid-based Mediapro Studio on the urging of its CEO, Laura Fernández Espeso, a rising star in Spain’s fast-expanding media sector.

“It’s been an incredible connection from the primary,” Cruz says, about her working relationship with Fernández Espeso, Selection’s Worldwide Media Girl of the Yr.

It was no shock to anybody that Cruz selected Fernández Espeso as her companion: Lifting up feminine expertise in Western Europe and past has been an enormous a part of Fernández Espeso’s mission since she took the reins of the busy manufacturing studio 5 years in the past. At her path, the corporate, which has 30 manufacturing homes, has capitalized on the rising demand for TV collection that may journey the world over. Fernández Espeso has steered the trouble for the corporate to make its productions extra saleable by lensing in English. She has additionally sought to extend range in each facet of Mediapro Studio operations by recruiting from exterior of Spain.

“One of many essential motivations for my and Laura’s launching Moonlyon is to offer alternatives for brand spanking new writers, actors, administrators,” Cruz says. “We’re additionally working with loads of wonderful, very, very gifted ladies, some well-known, some newer. We’re very enthusiastic about that. Generally we’re like simply eight ladies in a gathering and it simply it is sensible.”

Cruz and Fernández Espeso met once they labored on the Woody Allen’s 2008 movie, “Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which Grup Mediapro, The Mediapro Studio’s mother or father firm, produced.

Like Cruz, Fernández Espeso is pushed. At a dinner throughout Spain’s San Sebastian Movie Pageant in 2020, a lot of the government attendees began out with small speak. Fernández Espeso, in distinction, had a message to ship. She needed to get the phrase out instantly about Mediapro Studio’s main latest achievement: that the corporate was promoting their collection “The Head” territory by territory and would retain 100% of the IP.

“She is an government with imaginative and prescient and energy and, on the identical time, an excellent human being,” says Pierluigi Gazzolo, CEO of TelevisaUnivision’s streamer ViX.

Born in a village close to Zamora in western Spain, Fernández Espeso, 52, has moved in her profession from London to Brussels to Madrid to Los Angeles and again to Madrid. Now, she’s considered one of Southern Europe’s uncommon top-ranking feminine executives, operating the worldwide powerhouse behind motion pictures like “The Good Boss,” starring Javier Bardem, and backing TV collection like Netflix’s “The Younger Pope” with Jude Regulation.

If Fernández Espeso’s life have been made into an origin story, nonetheless, it could heart on Brussels, the place she labored from her mid-twenties for almost six years for 2 giant U.S. multinationals.

“It modified me quite a bit. My associates and work colleagues have been from everywhere in the world,” Fernandez Espeso recollects, sitting on the headquarters of The Mediapro Studio on the northern fringe of Madrid with an expansive view of the Guadarrama mountains. “I had my son there. It adjustments you, giving beginning overseas in one other language. It’s massively influential to convey up your son for his first years in one other tradition. You turn into extra versatile and tolerant, your being the foreigner.”

That crash course in cultural range proved invaluable years later when she arrived at Mediapro. “If you’ve spent your early profession in Brussels in worldwide and return to Spain, everyone thinks you perceive worldwide. That opened plenty of doorways,” Fernández Espeso says.

Fernández Espeso has sketched out a roadmap for progress by serving to unfold Mediapro Studio’s exercise into new territories together with Uruguay, Canada and China. She struck a content material manufacturing alliance with Turkey’s Medyapim, reflecting her imaginative and prescient that producers the scale of The Mediapro Studio can develop by way of good co-productions and partnership offers.

“Laura is uniquely good at understanding the enterprise wants of media firms in plenty of markets around the globe,” says Erik Barmack, former head of worldwide content material for Netflix. The Mediapro Studio made an fairness funding in Barmack’s Los Angeles-based Wild Sheep Content material.

Earlier than becoming a member of Mediapro, Fernández Espeso labored in manufacturing for Globomedia, Spain’s largest scripted collection manufacturing firm. When she joined Globomedia in 2009, Spain was doing a roaring commerce in format offers on collection. However the world monetary disaster sank Spain’s TV promoting market. Demand for content material shrank nearly in a single day.

So in 2011, Globomedia president Daniel Ecija dispatched Fernández Espeso to Los Angeles to discover TV format gross sales and originals manufacturing. She spent the subsequent three and a half years there.

The timing was fortuitous. When Grup Mediapro purchased Globomedia in 2015, the high-end drama collection revolution was lifting off, with Mediapro co-producing “The Younger Pope,” its first massive worldwide collection. Rating as considered one of a handful of executives in Spain with actual TV work expertise overseas, Fernández Espeso was named Grup Mediapro’s director of worldwide content material in 2015. As worldwide TV turned Mediapro’s greatest supply of progress, she was named company and TV director at The Mediapro Studio at its launch in 2019. She was promoted to CEO a 12 months later. On January 1, 2025, she’ll turn into the Grup Mediapro’s common supervisor.

Now, Fernández Espeso is getting ready to overcome the U.S. market in a serious manner and can quickly be unveiling a primary slate of titles produced in English out of North America.

What are your priorities at The Mediapro Studio?

A very powerful is progress in English-speaking markets such because the U.S. We should always have the ability to announce information about that in Could. And we’d prefer to strengthen our operations in Latin America. We’re already positioned and producing quite a bit, but it surely’s nonetheless considered one of our principal progress areas. There are extra alternatives than ever. Our focus is the place we’ve got operations: Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile and the U.S. Spanish-language movie/ TV market dealt with out of Miami.

Your greatest progress has been in worldwide TV manufacturing. What about movie?

We’ve been making about two movies a 12 months. Now we’re going to make many extra. There’s a big demand from streaming providers. Some motion pictures we produce, others are platform originals, some will open in cinema theaters. We’re getting ready movies in Latin America and extra in Spain.

You your self minimize your enamel engaged on movies by Francis Ford Coppola, Ken Loach and Juan José Campanella.

Sure, as director of promoting. After I got here again from Brussels I used to be given the large international names. Folks thought that I might do international administrators. These have been the primary years of my profession, together with the launch of Francis Ford Coppola’s “Tetro,” which he shot in Buenos Aires after which Alicante in 2008. I keep in mind him commenting that this was the primary time he opened a shoot to the press.

Folks affiliate Spanish TV’s lift-off with “Cash Heist” turning into Netflix’s first worldwide block- buster in 2018. However actually the revolution began a lot earlier than. A research from The Wit famous that, in 2014, Spain had extra format diversifications than every other nation on the earth. And also you have been there at first.

Sure. In 2009, Globomedia was Spain’s greatest scripted collection producer, although initially I headed up cinema. In TV, Globomedia was the export pioneer and was terribly profitable earlier than the arrival of Netflix and different streamers. It offered nearly all its collection in additional than 150 nations.

Presently, eight of Netflix’s Prime 10 non-English collection and films ever are from Spain. Why do you assume Spain has been this profitable?

Spain has spectacular inventive expertise. After I was at Globomedia, you couldn’t assist being in touch with the entire creators — Daniel Ecija, Laura Belloso, Alex Pina, Fernando González Molina, Pilar Nadal — a technology of fabulous writers who made collection which traveled the world over. We couldn’t compete in primetime with the large budgets and VFX of U.S. collection, so we needed to develop characters extra, construct an area connection through humor.

Do you’re feeling you’re elevating the glass ceiling?

There are loads of different prime ladies executives whom I respect quite a bit. However in fact there’s nonetheless an terrible lot to do when it comes to equality, which is a large concern for me. At Mediapro, I’m working with all of the [tools] I’ve to enhance this. I belong to the Group Mediapro’s range committee, a watch- canine to see that protocols are carried out. And it’s actually pressing and extremely essential for the studio to mirror quite a bit on what tales we inform, as a result of we’ve got the accountability — we attain tens of millions of viewers and spectators. So the questions are: What tales will we selected? Who writes them, directs and acts in them? What kinds of characters, and what roles do they fulfill?

Mediapro launched a screenwriting Grasp’s program in 2019, teaming with Madrid’s Complutense College, Barcelona’s ESCAC after which El Labs to collaborate with a brand new technology of expertise working in Twitch, TikTok, podcasts, and so on.

All of the Grasp’s contributors have internships on our productions and greater than 50% at the moment are working on the studio. Coaching pertains to range; it’s so essential to have extra writers, each men and women, and ladies main writers’ rooms. In the event you’re accountable for an organization as massive as The Mediapro Studio, which has 30 manufacturing homes, you’ve an obligation to contribute to the business, prepare and enhance its professionals.