In Pan's Labyrinth Ivana Baquero gave a child performance built on listening rather than display, and it remains the reason to know her name. She has worked steadily since in fantasy, horror and television, without a part that asks as much of her.
Fi1m perspective
The faun tells Ofelia she is a princess, and Ivana Baquero does not smile. She looks at him as if he might be lying, and keeps looking. She was eleven when Pan's Labyrinth (2006) was made; the part had been written for a younger girl and Guillermo del Toro changed the script to fit her, and you can see why he bothered. Most children on screen perform for the camera. Baquero performs for the other person in the scene, and the camera is left to catch up.
That is the trick, if it is one, and del Toro told her it could not be taught. "You have the instinct," she remembers him saying. What it looks like on screen is a girl who listens more than she speaks and refuses to be sweet. She is stubborn with her mother, wary with the captain, and when Lala Huete puts her in a dark green dress with a white collar for his dinner she has ruined it in the mud of the fig tree within the hour. We expected to be charmed by her and were not; we were worried for her from the first reel to the last, which is a far harder thing for a child to make an audience feel, and she does it by never once asking to be liked.
The rest of the career is harder to see from here. Before del Toro there were small parts in Spanish genre films, Romasanta (2004) and Fragile (2005), and she has worked with Paco Plaza twice and Jaume Balagueró once, which tells you the company she kept. The New Daughter (2009) took her into English-language horror opposite Kevin Costner. Since then most of the work has been long-form television: the lead in The Shannara Chronicles (2016–2017), High Seas (2019–2020), and lately A Widow's Game (2025) and Spartacus: House of Ashur (2025–). We have not reviewed any of it, and we will not pretend to.
What we can say is that she has stayed in fantasy and horror, playing young women dealing with trauma or with things that should not exist, and that those who have watched her there keep describing the same quality: she stays plain and truthful beside the prosthetics. She has said herself that the early success has not boxed her in. Perhaps not. But the stillness that made Ofelia is something a director has to want, and long-running series rarely have the patience for it. Del Toro wanted it once, and she was eleven. We would like to see someone ask the adult for it.
Biography
Ivana Baquero Macías is a Spanish actress. Born in Barcelona, she attended the American School of Barcelona and began acting professionally as a child with small roles in films such as Fragile (2005).
At the age of 11 she was cast as Ofelia in Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth (2006). The performance brought her critical acclaim and the Goya Award for Best New Actress. She later appeared in The New Daughter (2009) and played Eretria in the television series The Shannara Chronicles (2016).
