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Money Heist

TV SERIES · 2017–2021 · SPAIN

Money Heist

Created by
Álex Pina
Network
Netflix, Antena 3
Seasons
3
Episodes
41
Studio
Vancouver Media
Original title
La casa de papel

39 archived facts 6 topics 2 sources Last reviewed Oct 2026

To carry out the biggest heist in history, a mysterious man called The Professor recruits a band of eight robbers who have a single characteristic: none of them has anything to lose. Five months of seclusion - memorizing every step, every detail, every probability - culminate in eleven days locked up in the National Coinage and Stamp Factory of Spain, surrounded by police forces and with dozens of hostages in their…

  • Money Heist — production image

39 Interesting Facts About Money Heist

Interesting Facts (2)

  1. #001

    This Spanish TV series was the most watched non-English show on Netflix since its release, Until Squid Game (2021) was released and became the most watched non-English show on Netflix.

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  2. #002

    Croatian actor Luka Peros dubbed his own voice for the Portuguese, German, English, French and Italian distribution of the series.

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Production Story (10)

  1. #003

    "Bella Ciao," heard several times in the series, is a partisan anthem adapted from an old Italian country folk song of the late 19th century. In WWII it stood for the Italian resistance to Benito Mussolini, and it's sung around the world as an anti-fascist hymn of freedom and of survival in hard times. Countless famous singers have recorded it, it's been translated into many languages, and it still turns up at protests and acts of resistance everywhere.

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  2. #004

    The limited series was first cut into 15 episodes. Spain's Antena 3 showed nine, took a break and then aired the last six. Since those episodes averaged 70 minutes, Netflix re-edited them to about 45 minutes to suit American viewers, so season one grew from 9 episodes to 13. After a break between seasons, Netflix put out season 2 from April 6, re-cutting 6 episodes into 9.

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  3. #005

    In an interview, director Álex Pina revealed that they never wrote out the whole script of a single series in advance, so they could find out where the story might go and keep creating chaotic, adrenaline-charged situations.

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  4. #006
    Contains a major spoiler — show

    The original idea was for all the robbers to have terminal diseases, giving them a reason to team up for the heist. As it turned out, they all ended up with different circumstances, and only Berlin had a disease.

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  5. #007

    For Vancouver Media's first project, Álex Pina and Jesús Colmenar debated between a comedy and a heist story for television, a genre Spanish TV had never tried.

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  6. #008

    Álex Pina developed Money Heist with former Locked Up colleagues as a passion project, a chance to try new things free of outside interference, and he insisted on a limited series because he felt his earlier shows had been watered down by running too long.

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  7. #009

    It took a month to write the first five lines of the Money Heist pilot, because neither the Professor nor Moscow worked as narrator; in the end they chose Tokyo.

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  8. #010

    The producers went through more than 50 drafts of the Money Heist pilot before they were happy, and later scripts were finished at a rate of one a week to keep up with filming.

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  9. #011

    When Netflix opened its first European production hub in Tres Cantos, near Madrid, in 2018, Money Heist's main filming moved there, onto a set three times larger than the one used for parts 1 and 2.

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  10. #012

    Part 3 of Money Heist opens with scenes shot in Thailand, on Panama's Guna Yala islands and in Florence, Italy, breaking the claustrophobia of the first two parts and showing the plot's worldwide fallout. The fifth and final season wrapped on 14 May 2021.

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Behind the Scenes (9)

  1. #013

    The Bank of Spain wouldn't let the crew visit the real building to copy it on set, so the interiors are largely invented. The team said they built them with "a lot of gray and a dictatorial flavour," taking inspiration from the "Valley of the Fallen," a monument of the Franco regime.

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  2. #014

    Episodes were filmed in order, and the actors only got each script as that episode was being shot, so they had no idea where their characters were headed. Álvaro Morte (The Professor) said the cast would excitedly text one another whenever a new script arrived.

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  3. #015

    From outside, the heist building is not Spain's actual Royal Mint but the Spanish National Research Council in Madrid. The production tried to film at the Mint, but the institution refused, so the interiors were shot in a studio.

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  4. #016

    Javier Gutiérrez turned down the role of the Professor because of his prior commitment to Champions (2018), which was filmed at the same time as the first season.

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  5. #017

    Red was the foundation of Money Heist's design, described as "one of the distinguishing features of the series" against its gray sets, while blue, green and yellow were banned from the production design. To achieve "absolute film quality," shades of red were tested on different fabrics and textures and under different lighting.

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  6. #018

    The robbers' red jumpsuits nodded to the yellow prison uniforms of Locked Up, and for part 3 Italian fashion brand Diesel reworked them for a better fit and launched a clothing line inspired by the show.

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  7. #019

    To keep the plot realistic, the Money Heist producers asked for, and got, advice from Spain's national police, civil guard and Ministry of the Interior.

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  8. #020

    The banknotes the robbers handle were printed with the Bank of Spain's permission and made oversized to prevent counterfeiting.

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  9. #021

    To save time, production split into two units: one shot the Professor and police scenes, the other the robbers' scenes.

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Characters & Cast (10)

  1. #022

    Everything about Tokio, from her haircut to her wardrobe, was strongly inspired by Mathilda (Natalie Portman) in Léon: The Professional (1994).

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  2. #023

    Denver's distinctive laugh was in the script before Jaime Lorente was even cast. The script just asked for "trashy laughter," and every actor who auditioned took it a different way.

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  3. #024
    Contains a major spoiler — show

    El Profesor (Álvaro Morte) and Berlin (Pedro Alonso) weren't meant to be brothers at first. Morte and Alonso invented a backstory for them as half-brothers, with Berlin the elder, from their father's first marriage, and explained the bit of Russian they speak by having Berlin take his little brother to Russia for medical treatment when he was young.

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  4. #025

    The Professor was imagined as a charismatic yet shy villain, able to get the robbers to follow him and to win the audience over to their fight against powerful banks.

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  5. #026

    The Professor was tricky to develop because he didn't fit any standard archetype, and the producers weren't sure how brilliant he should be. They settled early on his Salva persona, but at first were looking for a 50-year-old Harvard professor type along the lines of Spanish actor José Coronado.

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  6. #027

    The casting directors championed Álvaro Morte, whom they knew from the Spanish soap El secreto de Puente Viejo, even though he had little prime-time experience then. Morte went through the whole casting process and built the role from outside analysis rather than personal experience, calling the Professor a tremendous box of surprises that never stops creating uncertainty, so audiences can't tell whether he's good or bad.

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  7. #028

    Alonso based his Berlin partly on a chance encounter the day before he got his audition script, with someone he found intelligent but provocative, even manipulative, toward him.

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  8. #029

    Alonso saw in Berlin a sharp observer with an unusual grasp of his surroundings, and used that to give him unconventional, unpredictable behaviour.

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  9. #030

    Two of the cast had worked on Álex Pina's earlier shows: Paco Tous (Moscow) starred in the 2005 TV series Los hombres de Paco, and Alba Flores (Nairobi) in Locked Up. Flores was offered Nairobi without an audition after Pina realised late in development that the gang needed another woman.

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  10. #031

    Itziar Ituño was cast as Inspector Raquel Murillo, the robbers' opponent. Ituño saw her as a strong, powerful woman in a man's world who is also sensitive in private, and drew on Clarice Starling of The Silence of the Lambs, an FBI trainee with a messy family life who comes to sympathise with a criminal.

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Easter Eggs & References (7)

  1. #032

    When she talks to the robbers, Inspector Raquel Murillo (Itziar Ituño) often ties her hair up with a pencil to focus, much like the purple ribbon Violet Baudelaire uses, one of the three main characters of Lemony Snicket's (a.k.a. Daniel Handler's) children's book series A Series of Unfortunate Events.

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  2. #033

    In part 3's opening credits, the words "una mattina mi sono alzato" appear above a doorway: the opening line of "Bella Ciao," the Italian folk song heard throughout the series.

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  3. #034
    Contains a major spoiler — show

    Nearly every member of the heist team is named after a national capital: Berlin (Germany), Helsinki (Finland), Moscow (Russia), Nairobi (Kenya), Oslo (Norway), Tokio/Tokyo (Japan), Lisbon (Portugal) and Bogota (Colombia); even the pet ferret is called Sofia (Bulgaria). The exceptions are Denver (capital of Colorado), Rio de Janeiro (capital of the state of Rio de Janeiro), Palermo (capital of Sicily, and also a well-known area of Buenos Aires, Argentina, where the actor's character comes from) and Marseille (a French city). Stockholm, meanwhile, is not only Sweden's capital but also a nod to "Stockholm syndrome," in which hostages come to side psychologically with their captors.

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  4. #035
    Contains a major spoiler — show

    In one episode, Nairobi berates Berlin (Pedro Alonso) for shooting someone instead of "cutting their ear off like in the movies," a reference to Reservoir Dogs (1992), Quentin Tarantino's first feature.

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  5. #036
    Contains a major spoiler — show

    For Raquel, the Professor plays Scott Joplin's "The Entertainer" (1902) on the piano, the same tune that serves as the theme of The Sting (1973), the story of a team out to pull off the ultimate con.

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  6. #037
    Contains a major spoiler — show

    After part 4 premiered, some viewers pointed out on social media that the last episode's subtitles had a gunshot in the fade to black after El Profesor and Alicia's face-off, even though no shot could be heard. Netflix swapped in new subtitles without it a few days later, hinting that the cliffhanger may first have been planned with a gunshot, not just Alicia aiming her gun at him.

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  7. #038
    Contains a major spoiler — show

    The heist is set in mid-to-late October 2016, and the closing scene of part 2's final episode, a full year later, lines up with the show's original premiere in November 2017.

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Deeper Meaning (1)

  1. #039

    The robbers wear masks of the famous Spanish surrealist painter Salvador Dalí, a champion of causing confusion and not reining in one's imagination, just what the Professor and his gang are up to.

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Sources & editorial notes

Reference databases

  • Wikipedia English Wikipedia article
  • IMDb IMDb title page (trivia)

Sources for the entries on this page

  1. Wikipedia Money Heist — WikipediaEncyclopedia · accessed 17 Sep 2026

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