Silvio Orlando

In his exchanges with Jude Law in The Young Pope (2016), Silvio Orlando makes a contest for authority funny. His Cardinal Voiello deals in secrets and practical solutions, without treating religious devotion as an inconvenience. Law's alarming pope has someone capable of resisting him, and Orlando makes their encounters interesting even when the manoeuvring itself feels familiar. We laughed at Voiello's resistance to the pope because Orlando makes the struggle for the upper hand more entertaining than the schemes themselves.

Orlando had been playing men under pressure long before he put on the cardinal's robes. His collaborations with Nanni Moretti include Palombella rossa (1989) and The Caiman (2006), in which he plays the beleaguered film producer Bruno Bonomo. Moretti's anxious professionals and intellectuals gave him plenty of practice at making discomfort worth watching. Voiello brought wider international recognition, but the ability to make a man's authority look precarious was already well established.

Sorrentino gives Orlando enough room to make Voiello's devotion count. He is funny about the cardinal's efforts to manage power, but does not ask us to dismiss his faith. Loneliness matters in the series too, which keeps the clergy from becoming a succession of targets for an easy joke. The limitation is in the writing: some of the manoeuvring is too familiar to sustain much interest on its own. Orlando and Law keep their exchanges lively enough to carry us through those stretches.

He returned as Voiello in The New Pope (2020), and Parthenope (2024) continued his work with Sorrentino. His familiar Neapolitan inflection and measured irony are pleasures, though casting him for those alone would be a waste. The more useful challenge is to give him someone whose convictions complicate the comedy. For a first encounter, choose The Young Pope and allow for a few overfamiliar power games.