Colombian actress Laura Alonso plays Matilde, a fictional character who embarks on the journey to Macondo, in the Netflix two-part adaptation of García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Alonso is no stranger to the world of García Márquez. She previously portrayed Damaris in News of a Kidnapping, the Amazon Prime series based on the author’s nonfiction book of the same name. Now, as she herself has said, the magical realism woven throughout the pages of One Hundred Years of Solitude has seeped into her very skin.
Yet her connection to García Márquez’s universe predates both productions. It was in the theater that Alonso first encountered the characters born from his novels — specifically Angela Vicario, from Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Moved by a stage adaptation she attended as an audience member, Alonso was so captivated by Angela that she eventually stepped out of the spectator’s chair and onto the stage, bringing the character to life herself.
Laura Alonso’s journey into Netflix’s One Hundred Years of Solitude
The fate of the Buendía generations traveled from the written word to the spoken one, journeying through Colombia’s most majestic landscapes in Netflix’s series adaptation.
Matilde does not appear in the original novel, but in the show she serves as a steadfast companion to Úrsula Iguarán throughout the courageous and wondrous journey toward Macondo — the fictional town at the heart of García Márquez’s universe, a place that holds within it Colombia’s history and identity. Alonso appears in the first episodes, directed by Argentine filmmaker Alex García López, and admits to feeling adrift at first when trying to understand her character, given that Matilde has no backstory in the source material. It is through her surroundings and the deep bonds she forges with other characters that Alonso ultimately finds her.
“Colombia became Macondo,” Alonso said. Witnessing her country’s nature and its quiet magic proved essential to building her character from the ground up.
The world Alonso stepped into is the one García Márquez conjured in the novel’s opening lines: “At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.”
Alonso’s character and Macondo’s founders lived through that earliest stage on screen — and because filming was done chronologically, beginning with Úrsula and José Arcadio Buendía leaving their hometown in search of the sea, the cast experienced the village’s evolution firsthand. On the very first day of shooting, roughly 80 people — cast and crew alike — waded through a swamp where the water nearly swallowed them and every step risked a fall.
For Alonso, discovering Macondo mirrored the path her character walked. Filming in sequence, she said, was nothing short of magical — a privilege few actors are afforded.
“Macondo is like a breeze,” she said, “impregnated with the Caribbean, and it has a life of its own.”
In January 2023, while in the middle of filming another movie, Alonso received a casting call. She approached the producers and asked for time off — a request they granted without hesitation. “Everyone understood the importance of One Hundred Years of Solitude for the country,” she said.
After a month and a half of waiting — a stretch that felt far longer — the call came that would change everything, pulling her into one of the most rewarding projects of her career. The experience left her with lasting friendships and lessons she carries with her still.
Alonso believes the novel captures, with rare beauty, the magic embedded in the rhythms of everyday life. It is that quality, she says, that draws her to García Márquez’s work more broadly — so much so that she hopes one day to portray a character from his short story “La mujer que llega a las seis.” For now, though, her greatest wish is simpler: that audiences, moved by what they see on screen, will pick up the book.
Interview originally conducted in January 2025.