They wanted someone who looked like ‘Bad Spencer’ and they found it in Bilbao. They hired him through a newspaper ad. That is how fernando arrien In the 70s, it became the Italian actor’s private label.

fernando arrien became Spencer’s alter ego. In fact, he appears in several films with another actor who was not Terence Hill. They thus took advantage of the couple’s pull: a kind of series B within the series B itself.

He became known as Fernando Bilbao, but he had more stage namess. “Fred Harrison or Harrison…”, list his relatives. “I don’t know why he changed, but instead of putting Arrin he put Harrisson,” explains his cousin Jesús Arrien.

His cousins ​​from Laukiz are now reviewing the newspaper clippings they have been accumulating. That was the only way to find out about Fernando’s adventures, always recording between Spain and Italy. There he filmed more than 70 titles.

“He looks like Bud Spencer. He was already 28 years old here when he started doing the Praetorian Guard,” says his cousin, taking one of the photographs.

In Bilbao they came to give him up for dead, since that was his destiny in most of his films, especially westerns. “My mistress believed that she had been killed in the movie,” she herself recounts to the cameras.

He did not get to shoot with Fellini, but he did with Chalton Heston, Paco Rabal, Alfredo Landa or Bud Spencer himself. He died a couple of decades ago in his retreat in Malaga, after having played Frankenstein several times. Fernando Arrien was an actor typecast by his physique, that of a celluloid colossus.