Commissioner Ricciardi 2: how good is Lino Guanciale?

The prejudice that most hovered in film schools and academies until not too long ago was that fictional actors were second-class, a sub-brand product of their cinema colleagues and, obviously, of those in the theatre. It took years to debunk this myth and make everyone understand how much strength and dedication it takes to challenge yourself with an infinity of roles that live and evolve over the course of several seasons, and it is unquestionable that Lino Guanciale has contributed not a little to this change of course, given that in his long career as an actor on the small screen – Lino Guanciale is, however, also very active on the big one – he has done more or less everything, from the smart guy to the sweetheart, from the naive to the obstinate, up to playing the role of a character that at first not everyone saw suitable for him: that of Commissioner Ricciardi, the tormented and suffering man created by Maurizio De Giovanni’s pen and soon became the protagonist of one of Rai1’s most successful TV seriescapable of reaching 21.5% share with the first episode of the new season aired on Monday 6 March.

Being an all-round actor means putting all your skills to good use in order to make a character believable, and this is why Lino Guanciale’s effort to make Luigi Alfredo Ricciardi a complex man, animated both by the desire to do good but also by the pain of living what he perceives as a curse, is absolutely extraordinary. Immersed in a 1930s Naples in shades of gray and white, so cold and surgical that it reminds us of the atmosphere of 1980s gangster movies, Commissioner Ricciardi digs, yes, inside different murder cases to be solved, but by entering them the torment of a commissioner who has the ability to encounter the ghosts of people who have disappeared by violent death until justice is served. Lino Guanciale’s challenge in this fiction co-produced by Rai Fiction with Clemart srl and Rai Com was therefore twofold: on the one hand to represent the stubbornness of arriving at a solution to dismiss the investigation and on the other to make it alive and credible on the screen the inner conflict of a character so scared of his fate that he renounces love for fear of giving birth to a son tomorrow who could inherit the ability to see and speak with the dead like him, thus ruining his life.

The result is a fiction that looks like a film, attention to the smallest details, thanks also to the direction of Gianpaolo Tescari, the scenography by Gianni Coletti and the costumes by Alessandra Torella, and to a protagonist, Lino Guanciale, in fact, who managed to sew on a character who, we are sure, could easily having attracted the envy of cinema colleagues who often have little chance of working in depth on a role analyzing it and probing it as it deserves, without being able to dig as much as they would like. Lino Guanciale had this luck, and he also seems to have enjoyed himself, proving once and for all that being a fictional actor means entering the homes of millions of Italians with different masks, committing to disappear behind each of them. Guanciale absorbed this mission and made him from the very first project, making him credible both in the role of the charismatic and arrogant doctor Claudio Conforti de The pupil as in that of the foreman Luca Giuliani of Survivors, and it is for this reason that we cannot fail to recognize his skill and dedication. A thousand of these Linen.

Other Vanity Fair stories you may be interested in:

Lino Guanciale: «Me sex symbol?»

Vanity Fair Stories 2022, Lino Guanciale: «That time, in Venice, I found myself in the bathroom with Ettore Scola»

Lino Guanciale: «Handsome me»

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