[2][3] The son of Ernesto Ottone Fernández, an adviser to President Ricardo Lagos, and Patricia Ramírez, Ernesto Ottone left Chile at a young age, months before General Augusto Pinochet's 1973 coup d'état against the government of Salvador Allende, because that February his father, in that militant communist era, had been appointed vice president of the World Federation of Democratic Youth, based in Budapest.

[4] He grew up with his sister Soledad in Hungary and later lived in Paris, a city to which his father moved in 1982 after resigning from the Communist Party.

In parallel to his studies, he was a waiter (at Tallarín Gordo and La Leona) and a bartender, worked at the Municipal Theater, made short films, and sold cell phones.

[7] Ottone graduated as an actor and obtained a postgraduate degree in cultural management at Paris Dauphine University in 1998,[8] a field in which he started working in 1997.

"I came with a clear head, having lived almost a year and a half in Berlin, where the only thing I did was absorb good vibes," recalled Ottone in a 2015 interview.