Beginning with supporting roles in large productions, he became a character actor in many Spanish genre films, and later found employment on television.
Buoyed by this exposure, he decided to make acting his full-time career, honing his craft under the tutelage of American expatriate thespian and teacher William Layton.
[9][10] Amidst the moral liberalization that followed General Franco's death, he appeared in several S-rated movies, a new classification mostly used for sex films that bridged the previous era's strict censorship and the full-on pornography that would come about in the mid-1980s.
[14] As the Spanish B-movie industry withered in the 1990s, Mayans found his most significant work in television series while his later features, including collaborations with another cult figure, Paul Naschy, did not always find wide distribution.
[4] However, the actor returned to public attention in 2023 with the film I'll Crush Y'all, whose director Kike Narcea paid tribute to the glory days of Spanish exploitation by casting him and fellow genre veteran Lone Fleming.
[15][16] Although he mostly worked in film and television, Mayans did participate in several stage productions, most notably the first Spanish presentation of Hair and the national classic Life is a Dream.
[1][6]: 10:30, 13:17 The latter play also gave its name to La vida es sueño, a filmmaking masterclass he hosted in Madrid for production company Artistic Films in 2021.
On this occasion, the company behind the event produced an English-language short film where the actor plays a fictionalized version of himself, called Bring Me the Head of Antonio Mayans and released the following year.