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Filippo Scotti, “It was Paolo’s hand”

This article is published in number 45 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until November 9, 2021

Yesterday he was one of the many hopeful young actors with a few short films and a couple of series behind him. Today, 22 years not yet turned, he is the protagonist of the autobiographical masterpiece by Paolo Sorrentino which represents Italy at the 2022 Oscars. For the role of the sixteen-year-old Fabietto in It was the hand of God Filippo Scotti has already won the Marcello Mastroianni award as best emerging at the Venice Film Festival and has entered the shortlist of performers to keep an eye on according to Variety (in the past the honor went, among others, to Timothée Chalamet and Lupita Nyong’o). In short, it is the revelation made in Italy, the talent everyone is aiming for. And that’s how it went. Filippo Scotti, on tour overseas precisely for the promotion of the film which is heading for further triumphs, in cinemas from November 24 and on Netflix from December 15, had just landed in Rome with a flight from Los Angeles, when he learned of the choice of the commission selection. Soon after, on the phone with Vanity Fair while his gaze hovers over Piazza Testaccio, he is shamelessly happy. “He is grateful, and honored.” Repeats the word “wonderful” and derivatives, which becomes almost an interlayer. With the grace of a Neapolitan gentleman of yesteryear and the candor of someone who has not yet got used to interviews, he retraces his last year zero.

Let’s start in order, from the “New Year”.
“At the first audition, with the wonderful casting director Annamaria Sambucco, I didn’t think I had to interpret the whole film, but only a part, adolescence”.

When will the meeting with Paolo Sorrentino?
“Two weeks later, at the second audition, which was followed by another two or three, I don’t remember.”

Performance anxiety?
“Total! I didn’t sleep there at night ».

And once it’s been chosen?
«The next day I went to him, in a small house in Naples, to read the script with Marlon Joubert, Teresa Saponangelo and Toni Servillo. Since I was very happy I found myself terrified. I joined Paolo on the balcony to ask him if he was sure of his choice: there was still time to go back ».

Did you ever ask him why he wanted her?
“Never. In the interviews he says he found in me not so much a physical resemblance as that shyness and that sense of inadequacy towards the world that characterized him as a teenager ».

Did he see us right?
«I spent the first years of high school – the classical high school in Naples, where my family moved from the province of Como when I was a child – in a condition similar to that of Fabietto. It wasn’t that I didn’t have any friends, but I preferred loneliness, feared misunderstanding and had difficulty in school. Metaphorically speaking, I felt constrained in a narrow space ».

How did he get out of that “space”?
“On the advice of my mother I was already attending theater courses. One day the Italian high school teacher introduced me to an expressive reading workshop, from here they called me for a show at the Children’s Theater. Instead of going to school, I spent the mornings at the Bellini. One day the artistic director Gabriele Russo stopped me on the stairs to offer me a small part in Tito Andronico. He took me to the dark gallery, turned on the flashlight of the cell phone and asked me for a few jokes point blank. Then he said, “The role is yours. We rehearse eight hours every day: are you there? ”. I was at risk of failing: I accepted anyway. It happens that the wrong choices are the right ones. From there I found an agent, I started taking the auditions ».

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