Drusilla Foer, who is the co-host of the third evening of Sanremo 2022

Cold white hair, styled in wide and soft folds, over one meter and 85 centimeters of elegance. Drusilla Foer is the host of the third evening of the Sanremo Festival together with Amadeus, but to tell it better, you first say what it is not. She’s not a dragqueen, she’s not a trans woman, and most of all, Drusilla Foer does not exist. If he is asked of her, he replies that he is “an elderly showgirl“. She is a fictional character but she has a personality of her own and likes to specify that she has nothing to do with Gianluca Gori54, actor and writer, who invented Drusilla and gives her body.

He knows that there is a lot of curiosity about his presence at the Festival: “Amadeus made an act of audacity by choosing a controversial and not accommodating subject like me, I hope to reward this audacity in the best possible way”. And she is also excited: «The Festival is like the matches of Italy when there is the World Cup, you identify with it, you sit on the sofa cheering. I’m getting ready, even to go down the stairs. Then, at my age, let’s face it, it is much more difficult to climb them ».

The general public will know her now, but Drusilla Foer is already known, why has already done a lot of TV together with Piero Chiambretti (Matrix Chiambretti And The republic of women) and then with Nunzia De Girolamo (Hi male!), starred in Magnificent presence by Ferzan Ozpetek and in Always more beautiful by Claudio Norza, was a judge in Strafactor and during the period of the lockdown he raised the spirits of many by publishing funny videos on instagram. Above all at the center of his career is the theater and with his show Very elegantwhere he sings, acts and reflects, always gets full house. He also wrote an autobiography, You don’t know shamealready reprinted several times since October, in which he recounts his life in Cuba, New York, Siena and the memories, real or invented, of his and his double, Gianluca Gori.

As soon as Amadeus announced his presence, there was some controversy, which Drusilla, however, circumvented with calm and great class: “Premise: I don’t want to convince anyone. I don’t like to persuade, but to inspire. Having said that, if my naïve streak can serve the LGBTQ + cause, I’m happy. But I would also like to be the champion of abused women and of all people kept on the sidelines for any reason “.

Drusilla Foer is a bit of everything: upper-bourgeois Tuscan with aristocratic ways, writer, actress and singer, influencer, fashion icon, model. She displaces and intrigues, because it is the first time that a theatrical character arrives at the Sanremo Festival. In Drusilla there is something of Gianluca Gori, but when asked about him in the interviews, she replies that she doesn’t know any Gianluca. And also for this reason she has a lot of fun.

The creator and his double are two separate people. This is how Piero Chiambretti recounts the encounter with Gori: «The first time I entered his dressing room, I thought I had the wrong room. I found myself in front of a beautiful, very elegant Tuscan country boy, interesting and cultured. The second time I saw him he was Drusilla and he looked like Wanda Osiris, with briefcases, gloves and alpine feet in highly polished shoes ».

When they put labels on them and talk about an actress en travesti, Drusilla is not happy: «It is a waste to put the wrapping in front of the content. I am what I do, what I study, what I say“. Together with Gianluca Gori, he constitutes an “interlocking of elements in harmony with each other, incalculable, sometimes indecipherable that have the same mother: self-awareness,” he says when he explains his essence. Certainly one thing Drusilla and Gianluca share (he confessed it a few months ago at the Turin Book Fair): the passion for chips and gin and tonic.