Right now, actor Edgar Ramirez is getting a chance to be in the spotlight for a change with Florida Man on Netflix. The Venezuela-born entertainer has been active for years, but often has appeared in supporting roles and has yet to be consistently top-billed to become a household name like Pedro Pascal. In spite of this, he does have a diverse filmography.
Ramirez, 43, got his start in front of the camera in 2003 with work in Yotama se va volando and the Venezuelan production Punto y Raya. Both are not well-known today outside of Ramirez’s native country and, the year after this, he first showed up on the western radar with Domino by Tony Scott. While it was a box office bomb and received a poor critical reception, this did not hobble the performer as some bad films do (here’s looking at you, Josh Trank), following it up with Che in 2008, and the under-appreciated Vantage Point the same year. Again, these films kept the man working, and while some are remembered today, others he did in-between are faded from the public consciousness, and it was not until 2012 he arguably got to blow up properly.
At that point, Ramirez appeared in the Zero Dark Thirty film about the official account of how noted terrorist Osama bin Laden was tracked down and killed. He is CIA operative Larry Handley in the film, and outlets like Fox News said at the time of its release he was “on everyone’s radar,” and afterwards, this did happen to a degree. Ramirez worked with The Black Phone director Scott Derrickson on Deliver Us from Evil in 2014, teamed with David O. Russell and Jennifer Lawrence on Joy in 2015, and got with Matthew McConaughey on Gold in 2016. Each enjoyed a varying degree of success, but, working with actors like this means you are a known quantity, to a certain extent. His most-recent project was The 355, a spy thriller film released in January 2022.
On television, Ramirez’s story is much the same as his silver screen one. He began with foreign work before making a splash as the titular character in The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story in 2018 and followed this up in 2020 with The Undoing, before becoming the Florida fellow audiences can follow on Netflix. While critics have not been kind to the project (as of writing, it has the rare zero rating on Rotten Tomatoes), audiences seem to like it. So, Ramirez endures. What he will do next remains a mystery, but, good or bad, he has a lot of talent and an acting breadth to rival someone even as good as Tim Curry.