Luca Marinelli

Luca Marinelli’s Mussolini addresses the audience as though its attention were his due. In Joe Wright’s series Mussolini: Son of the Century (2025), he is puffed up, ridiculous and still determined to be heard. We felt uneasy about enjoying him so much, because the vanity that made us laugh also made us keep watching. Marinelli lets us see the effort to impress, and the performance is stronger for it.

His breakthrough lead in The Solitude of Prime Numbers (2010) began a run of leading and supporting parts in Italian cinema. Martin Eden (2019) made particular use of his physical and vocal work to show a man driven by ambition. The international breakthrough of The Old Guard (2020) did not take him away from arthouse films: he followed it with a lead in The Eight Mountains (2022).

For Wright’s series, Marinelli gained 20 kilograms and cut his hair, but the useful detail is the persistence he finds beneath the bluster. He never lets looking foolish mean that the man has stopped wanting something. Wright allows him to be grotesque rather than requiring the solemnity that so often passes for seriousness in historical drama. We would not want the performance made tidier; its vanity is what keeps it interesting.

Davide Serino and Stefano Bises give him speeches in which the appetite for an audience is as important as the words. Marinelli makes those displays persuasive enough that their length has a purpose. But over eight episodes the repeated speeches and Wright’s restless flourishes become tiring, and even this performance cannot make every repetition necessary. Our reservation is with how much of it the series asks us to take, not with the actor’s willingness to look absurd.

In Martin Eden, that forcefulness can approach caricature. It is a reason to value a director who can judge when a face or a voice has already done the work. For Marinelli at full stretch, start with Wright’s series, and resist the temptation to watch all eight episodes in a sitting.