Acting career
Ramirez's first recognition as an actor was the successful soap opera Cosita rica, for Venevisión which aired from September 2003 to August 2004, lasting 270 episodes. In 2005, he made his major motion-picture début playing Choco, Domino Harvey's love interest in the film Domino directed by Tony Scott.
This would be followed by Cyrano Fernandez, with Ramírez in the title role, and then Vantage Point, directed by Pete Travis. In the latter high-budgeted Sony Pictures political thriller, Ramírez joined an all-star international cast including Dennis Quaid, Matthew Fox, William Hurt, Forest Whitaker, Eduardo Noriega, and Ayelet Zurer. Ramírez plays Javier, an ex-special forces soldier forced to kidnap the American President in order to get his brother back.
Ramírez has since appeared in several other productions. Among those are the first part of the two film bundle Che by Steven Soderbergh, where he played the role of Ciro Redondo (a Cuban revolutionary who fought with Ché Guevara), La Hora Cero (The Magic Hour), a short film directed by Guillermo Arriaga; Plan B, directed by Alejandro García Wiederman (Venezuela); Yotama se va volando (Yotama Flies Away), directed by Luis Armando Roche (Venezuela-France); Punto y raya (Step Forward), directed by Elia K. Schneider (Venezuela-Spain-Chile-Uruguay), submitted by Venezuela for Oscar consideration for 2004 Best Foreign Film, in which he played Colombian soldier Pedro.
In 2007, he played the role of Paz, a Blackbriar assassin, in The Bourne Ultimatum; in its source novel The Bourne Ultimatum, the villain is Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, a.k.a. Carlos the Jackal. Ramírez went on to play the role of the actual Carlos in the 2010 French-German limited series Carlos. At the French César Awards 2011, he was awarded, for the film version of the TV series, the César Award for Most Promising Actor. Ramírez has also given his voice to language learning education, guest-starring on the audio CD supplement to the Fluenz Spanish 1 DVD software.
Ramírez appeared in the Clash of the Titans (2010) sequel, Wrath of the Titans (2012), playing Ares, the God of War. In 2012, he played Larry in the Kathryn Bigelow film Zero Dark Thirty. He played Bodhi in the 2015 remake of Point Break. In 2016, he played Dr. Kamal Abdic in the film The Girl on the Train.
In 2017, Ramírez played Gianni Versace in the second season of the anthology series American Crime Story. In 2019, Ramírez joined the cast of the spy thriller film The 355, which was released in 2022 and reunited him with ACS co-star Penélope Cruz.
