Four years after leaving the Olimpico, with the fans waving his photograph as if it were a holy card and the bitter tears of those who knew they were witnessing a piece of the history of Italian football, cinema and TV get involved agreement to pay tribute to the life and career of Francesco Totti underlining its greatness and weaknesses, stubbornness and irony. And so, after the documentary by Alex Infascelli premiered at the Rome Film Fest, it’s the turn of I was hoping de died first, the six-episode series directed by Luca Ribuoli, inspired by autobiography A captain written by Totti himself together with Paolo Condò, who arrives on Sky Atlantic and streaming on NOW starting March 19th.
Through the temporal juxtaposition that now brings us to the times when Francesco was a kid from Porta Metronia who enjoyed throwing balls at his classmates after school and now leads us to the legend that, at the age of forty, is preparing to leaving Roma, the team that never left even when Real Madrid got in the way, the series focuses mainly on two aspects: the fragility that lead a champion to want to finish his career “with a bang” and the inexorability of time that passes and that, especially for a sportsman, it coincides with the end of the games, with the mathematical certainty that soon the field will be just a surface on which to walk and not the free zone to make an assist.
“The passing of time is an aspect that actors and actresses also deal with, because your face changes and the spectrum of characters you can play can be narrowed. I think, however, that the only way to be able to bear it is to jump ahead, do things that you wouldn’t normally do at that age: this allows you to make the future unpredictable, and life can only be bearable if it is unpredictable, otherwise you go crazy “he explains Pietro Castellitto, 29 years old, son of art, fresh from his success in Venice as director and screenwriter of de The predators and in his first leading role in the role of Totti. With the Captain the similarity is minimal but, as Pietro has repeatedly pointed out, his performance is not based on imitation, but on inspiration, a bit like Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network and Serena Rossi in I am mine. Giving up prosthetics and those very elaborate tricks that alter the connotations and risk weighing down the acting making it tiring and even a little annihilated, Castellitto focuses on mimicry and on a drawn-out speech that manages, more than the mask, to give us back a true Francesco Totti , authentic, with a quick intelligence and a strong Roman spirit. A speech that also applies to Greta Scarano, hugely talented actress who, to interpret Ilary Blasi, he chose to follow the same path, working on speech, posture and gestures, and developing a playlist – «The Ilary playlist» – able to load it before each scene.
Playing Ilary is one thing, following in her footsteps is another: when we ask her if she would ever lead theIsland of the Famosthe Gretas, in fact, cannot hold back the smile. “I don’t think I could ever be a presenter, but never say never. In the end, why set the stakes “ asks Scarano who, on closer inspection, is the real star of I was hoping de died first: it is she who gives the office to Francesco when he thinks he has no alternatives; she is the one who forces him to go to the Olimpico the night in which Luciano Spalletti, the “on & off” coach of Roma masterfully interpreted by Gianmarco Tognazzi, decides not to let Totti play to spite him. Together with the troubled months that accompany the farewell to the Giallorossi shirt and the beginning of a new life, I was hoping de died first he also manages to give us an overall picture of the Captain’s family, telling us something more about his mother Fiorella, another deux ex machina of Totti’s success with the face of Monica Guerritore, and his father Enzo, with the face of Giorgio Colangeli, who passed away due to Covid at the age of 76. “I don’t follow football much, I learned a lot of things from the screenplay” says Colangeli, perfectly aware of the pressure to which Castellitto was subjected to play such a beloved and so complex character (“It would have been easier to make Garibaldi”). His counterpart is Guerritore and her Fiorella, a true “she-wolf”, a mother who tries to keep her son anchored to the ground and who, to promote his career, agrees to revolutionize his life to be close to him: “We live the birth of Francesco and our being popular “explains Monica amused and grateful for having taken part in this project, in this series which, with extreme lightness, tells the last eighteen months of Totti’s career with the right amount of torment and ecstasy , of glorious tribute and genuine Romanism understood as a lifestyle, an approach to things but, above all, a spirit of adaptation and self-denial.
Speravo de morì prima – The Francesco Totti series is produced by Mario Gianani for Wildside, of the Fremantle group, with Virginia Valsecchi’s Capri Entertainment, The New Life Company and Fremantle.
(The editing of the opening interview is by Noraneko Produzioni)
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