Gonçalo Waddington

Gonçalo Waddington is a Portuguese actor, theater and film director, playwright and screenwriter. He was born in Lisbon in 1977 and studied theater and performance at Drama School in the beachside town of Cascais from 1994 to 1997. Still in school, he made his television debut in 1996, in Polícias, a TV show about a police precinct. His film debut came in 2006, with Marco Martins's Alice, having also played a part Martins's 2016 movie, Saint George. Waddington's short film Nameless, which premiered at the 2010 edition of the Las Palmas de Gran Canaria International Film Festival. Immaculate, premiered at the 2013 edition of the IndieLisboa film festival. Albertine, The Celestial Continent, a play based in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, was his debut as a playwright, which he also directed and starred, alongside his longtime companion, Carla Maciel. He also acted in Odisseia, the 2013 comedic TV show Gonçalo created, co-wrote and co-starred in. Alongside Carla Maciel, he co-created the play MacBain, from a text written specifically for the two actors by dutch playwright Gerardjan Rijnders. It premiered in October 2013 at the Teatro Maria Matos in Lisbon. In 2016, he wrote and directed the first part of a tetralogy called Our Favorite Sport, subtitled Present, which premiered in the Alkantara and FITEI festivals and was published as a book in the same year. Part two, subtitled Distant Future, premiered in 2017 at the Teatro Municipal São Luiz, in Lisbon. He was in movies such as Blood Curse and Noise, by Frederico Serra and Tiago Guedes, who directed and co-wrote the aforementioned Odisseia with him, and also directed him in a 2016 production of Henrik Ibsen's The Wild Duck at the Teatro Nacional D. Maria II, as well as the 2014 short film Chorus, from a play by Tiago Rodrigues, and the TV miniseries Noite Sangrenta. Gonçalo had also directed and starred in a production of Ibsen's Rosmersholm at the Centro Cultural de Belém, first in February 2011 and then on a nationwide tour. Margarida Cardoso's Yvone Kane, João Canijo's Misbegotten, João Leitão's The Portuguese Falcon, Ivo M. Ferreira's April Showers or Valeria Sarmiento's The Lines of Wellington were some of the other films that have featured him as a performer as well. In 2018, he will make his debut as a director of full-length movies with Patrick, alongside the O Som e a Fúria production company. The film is expected to premiere in 2019.