Eduardo Casanova publicizes that he has HIV: “Today I break this painful silence” | Culture | EUROtoday

The director and actor Eduardo Casanova (Madrid, 34 years outdated) introduced this Thursday on his Instagram account that he has HIV. “Today I break this unpleasant and painful silence after MANY years. A silence that many people with HIV keep and suffer from. I do it for myself, but I hope this can help more people,” he printed on his social community account together with a video with the preview of a documentary produced by journalist Jordi Évole. “Everyone has told me not to do this,” Casanova says within the clip. “Why do you do it?” Évole asks him. “Because it is unbearable.”

Although because the starting of the HIV pandemic, nice figures – Michael Jordan, George Michael, Conchita Wurst – have change into seen as HIV-positive; In Spain, an individual as well-known and with such cultural impression as Casanova has by no means achieved it. “I do it when I want. When I can. I do it my way, through cinema, which is my way of communicating,” he added in reference to the documentary movie that, as he detailed, “will be released in theaters soon; next year.” “There will be time to explain more things,” he added.

“That Eduardo Casanova says that he lives with HIV seems to me to be an act of generosity and commitment to fight against the stigma that still affects us people who live with the virus today,” stated Carmen Martín, president of the State Coordinator of HIV and AIDS (Cesida), in dialog with EL PAÍS. “No one had ever put into the public debate what it means to carry the fear of rejection and how unfair that situation is. With his gesture, Eduardo breaks with the outdated image we have of people who live with HIV and makes visible the weight of the stigma,” he continues.

The announcement made by Casanova follows the path of his first foray as an absolute creator in serial fiction: Silence ―premiered on Movistar Plus+ on December 1, World AIDS Day―, wherein it addresses the evolution of HIV from the origins of the pandemic to the current, influencing the vindication of the rights of HIV-positive individuals. A miniseries that mixes humor, vampires, social criticism and advocacy, and in whose manufacturing the group in protection of the rights of HIV-positive individuals, Apoyo Positivo, amongst others, has participated. This Thursday, the group confirmed its delight within the step taken by Casanova.

“Silence It’s my first series like showrunnerscreenwriter and director. I have already directed a commissioned series [Nacho, sobre Nacho Vidal]where I could put my stamp, but this is completely mine,” he detailed in an interview in EL PAÍS a few weeks ago. “The silence that people with HIV live today is terrifying,” he remarked. Now, less than a month after the premiere of his series, Casanova has announced that he lives with HIV “with dignity.”

“Dignity should be the way in which all people with HIV can come out of the closet,” he says on his Instagram account. Where he has additionally offered info: “About 80% of people with HIV have not shared with almost anyone that they have the infection, due to a stigma that condemns us to systematic and most unjust rejection in the world,” he denounced.

During the promotion of the series, Casanova explained that with Silence I wanted to end the prevailing narrative about HIV and AIDS (the most advanced stage of the infection, which takes time to develop after the virus has infected the body and does not occur if antiretroviral treatment has been started). The director and actor has also criticized that these narratives “are always the same: memory, homosexual men, drug-addicted men, catastrophe and death.”

Casanova is not the only creator who has decided to address HIV. The director Carla Simón has done it this year in Pilgrimagean autobiographical work in which he approaches the history of his parents. His father, a heroin addict, died in 1992 after developing AIDS as a result of sharing needles. The director’s mother died a few years earlier, in 1989, for the same reason. The award-winning Catalan director has been addressing HIV since her debut, Summer 1993 (2017) and is part of a generation of creators who are revisiting the story of an epidemic that had a full impact on our country.

On the other hand, Paco León also tangentially approaches HIV in the latest film he directed, There and back. It is a fictional recreation of the last week of filming of the successful television series, in which Casanova became known in his role as Fidel, and in which he plays himself. Its plot focuses on the difficulties he encounters when telling his co-workers that he lives with HIV. The film hits theaters on January 30, 2026.

Undetectable is untransmittable

“The medical advance has been incredible: with one pill a day or a puncture every two months you do not develop AIDS, you are non-transmissible and the medication has no side effects, as before,” explained Casanova in EL PAÍS. An idea that he repeated a few weeks ago during his visit to The Revolt by David Broncano: “Undetectable is untransmittable.” That is, thanks to the treatments, the viral load in a person who lives with the virus is so low that it cannot be transmitted.

“I feel we’re about to expertise a revolution. HIV looks like a forgotten concern and it shouldn’t be,” he stated in this newspaper. And he added: “Socially, the discourse is still what it was then.” [los años ochenta]. And the silence that people with HIV live today is terrifying.” Casanova has additionally warned of the issues that have an effect on individuals with HIV because of the silence to which they’re subjected: “There are many: anxiety, depression… And that is deadly. A treated infection is no danger to anyone, but silence is. “We all know individuals with HIV, however we do not know that they’ve it.”

Currently, in Spain some 150,000 people live with HIV. 83% of new HIV diagnoses in 2024 were due to sexual transmission, confirms the Ministry of Health. That year there were 3,340 new positives, which represents a rate of 6.95 per 100,000 inhabitants, above the EU average (5.3). Last year, transmission in men who have sex with men (MSM) was the most frequent (54.3%), followed by heterosexual transmission (28.7%), and through injection drug use (1.5%).

However, heterosexual individuals at present lead AIDS diagnoses in Spain. The newest figures for 2025 consolidate a pattern that started two years in the past and was additionally confirmed in 2024: that yr, of the 412 AIDS diagnoses in Spain, sexual means accounted for 139 instances in males who’ve intercourse with males whereas 161 occurred in heterosexual relationships (104 in males and 57 in girls). The remainder of the instances had been by means of different means. For the president of Cesida, “society has not felt challenged by prevention or care of sexual health.”