If there is something that characterizes model and actor Jon Kortajarena (Bilbao, 40 years old) it is discretion and careful management of everything related to his private life. So much so that it has just become known that he has become a father. A piece of news that journalist Marta Riesco exclusively revealed last Monday and that the magazine ¡Hola! confirmed this Wednesday, April 15. Rumors began after the Bilbao model was seen walking through the city streets pushing a baby stroller and was photographed. It is not known whether he has become a single father or the sex of the baby, among other details. It has also not been disclosed whether the child was adopted or born via surrogate, a practice that is illegal in Spain.
His closest circle has confirmed to the aforementioned magazine that the actor wants to handle this very special moment in his life “with the greatest naturalness.” For now, Kortajarena has not spoken about it and, as they say, he is not expected to show the baby on social media. “Although he does not want to hide from anything, he will not break his rule of using his public profiles only professionally,” the publication explains.
In 2018, the model already said in an interview with Divinity that he would like to be a father. “It is an experience I don’t want to miss. I don’t know when the time will be, life will tell, but in the end having a child has to be a very big experience, a very interesting change of priorities. Life is long and each moment has its place. If you organize yourself well, you can live them all intensely,” he said then. His last known relationship was with actor Luke Evans, in 2015.
#Riesxclusiva pic.twitter.com/9ao2zqXn4K
— MartaRS (@MartaRiesco) April 14, 2026
The model is a great defender of sustainability and is very aware of climate change. His followers are used to seeing him pick up plastics on beaches in the Basque Country, carry banners in Greenpeace actions, or travel to Vanuatu, an archipelago near Australia “from which people have already had to flee. They are climate refugees. And it is something that in a short time will be common if we do not try to provide solutions,” he told S Moda in 2024. His fight against the dictatorship of the new then led him to become an ambassador for Wallapop, the most important resale platform in Spain, for which he starred in an advertising campaign that he also helped to design.
Tom Ford’s favorite mannequin — they worked together for 13 years, and in 2022 they collaborated again —, since 2009 (in the film A single man) has also cultivated a career as an actor, in productions such as the series El inmortal, from Movistar Plus+, released in 2022. As he explained to ICON magazine in 2022, he was “a hypersensitive child, surrounded by many women with very strong personalities: my mother and my aunts, who were like my sisters. Since I was little, my family became a security nucleus.” In the interview, he also said that although he “played a lot with children and neighbors,” he felt “more comfortable” with his aunts and family: “I played with them, we went to the river, we caught sapaburuss and things like that.” And he confessed: “It can’t be said that I had problems relating, but I didn’t have much ease connecting with other children. Those movies made me feel that, somehow, in the adult world I was going to feel much more comfortable. I wanted to grow up.”
In 2014, at the height of his career boom as a model, he decided to buy a villa almost on the seafront in Lanzarote. He named it Casa Sua (sua means fire in Basque), a nod to the volcanic history of the island. “I was doing very well as a model, but I was at a moment of a lot of exposure and I needed a refuge,” he recalls. “Maybe I would have found it in the Balearic Islands, but in Lanzarote there is a part of my roots and it is a place where I can really disconnect. In the end, the Balearic Islands are full of paparazzi and people from the fashion industry. I wanted to disappear a bit and reconnect with nature and myself,” the model told El País Semanal in 2025.
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