The Gardener cast and character guide: Meet the actors in the Netflix thriller series

Who is really sowing the seeds of suspense in The Gardener? Netflix's 2025 Spanish romantic thriller released on April 11, 2025, was created by Miguel Sáez Carral and makes a sharp departure from the classic love story—exchanging candlelit meals for contract murders veiled in roses.

The key players in all this? A complicated array of characters goes through emotional trauma, power plays, and illicit love. If you are curious who brings this dark world to life, you are in the right place. Here's the full rundown of The Gardener cast—the actors and the characters who ground this dark tale in tension.

Behind the peaceful facade of a gardening company, The Gardener (El Jardinero) digs up a darker truth—a cover for a family-owned assassination ring—Álvaro Rico plays Elmer, a ruthless and efficient hitman, and Cecilia Suárez plays La China Jurado, his cunning mother and the puppeteer behind the operation.

Things begin to unravel when Elmer falls in love with Violeta—his next assignment. With escalating moral tension through subtle defiance, this drama lives on emotional intensity and power struggles.

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Meet the performers who drive this simmering thriller.

Álvaro Rico as Elmer

Playing Elmer, Álvaro Rico exchanges the designer school hallways of Elite for something far grittier. Elmer is not a typical love interest—he is emotionally numbed, unobtrusively compliant, and has been spending years on hits at his mother's command.

Rico acts as a man broken by the repetition of violence, his expression inscrutable but his eyes haunted. The minute he encounters Violeta, things change. This interior conflict—duty vs. conscience—is where Rico gives his finest performance so far.

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Cecilia Suárez as La China Jurado

Cecilia Suárez plays La China Jurado, Elmer's controlling mother and the mastermind behind the business of the garden shop front. Famous for her tranquil yet commanding presence on-screen, Suárez renders La China disturbing yet somehow engrossing.

She orchestrates every action Elmer takes, from the murders to the cover-ups, and controls his emotions with surgical precision. Their mother-son relationship becomes the series' moral battleground, as Elmer begins to stray from her control—quietly, but irretrievably.

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Catalina Sopelana as Violeta

Catalina Sopelana plays Violeta, the woman who shakes everything up. She is not just a target but a tipping point. Violeta makes Elmer realize something inside him that even he wasn't aware of: Vulnerability. Sopelana is equally balanced between being soft and hard, portraying a woman isn't what she seems.

While Elmer's feelings compromise his mission, Violeta is his ruination and potential salvation—though neither of them realizes it initially.

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Supporting cast of The Gardener

Though the main three characters lead the plot, The Gardener also features several supporting characters who elevate the show's tension and atmosphere. Those who revolve around Elmer and La China's business—partners, clients, and naive neighbors—all add to the duality of their universe.

The supporting cast includes Emma Suárez, Francis Lorenzo, María Vázquez, Ivan Massagué, Javier Morgade, and Esteban Roel.

Even though they don't command the screen, these secondary players fill out the gardens business-as-fig-leaf, rooting the show in something that seems solid, unsettling, and very slightly too still.

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Thematic focus in The Gardener: Love, control, and Redemption

Instead of a standard crime thriller, The Gardener leans into moral gray areas. Elmer's change is gradual but gut-wrenching. His relationship with La China isn't only familial—it is psychological warfare disguised as loyalty. The arrival of Violeta blows that dynamic wide open.

Although the cast isn't huge, the emotional spectrum required of each actor is considerable. They are not playing good guys and bad guys, but survivors conditioned by control, loss, and denied desire.

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The Gardener isn't a tale about flowers. It is about what lies buried beneath them. With Álvaro Rico, Cecilia Suárez, and Catalina Sopelana helming the narrative, the show relies on a close-knit cast to tackle emotional numbness, control, and redemption. Each performance straddles the story— no more, no less— just tension, stillness, and eyes that speak volumes.

Also read: The Gardener ending explained: Whom does Violeta want Elmer to murder?