Linda Caridi: “You don’t need to look like men to be successful”

When she was little, Linda Caridi she used to put on mum and dad’s clothes for fun: “I would come out of the room all dressed up and start entertaining”, she tells on the phone from Milan, adding that she had had a phase in which she enjoyed designing the autumn-winter collections wedding dress with a dressmaker set they had given her. Since she was a child, put yourself in someone else’s shoes it has become, for Caridi, the drive that led her to become an actress and to accept ever more daring challenges: the more extreme and far from her the disguise, the more Caridi enjoys creating. These days she is engaged in a theatrical project and in a small part in a film of which she cannot anticipate anything, but in the meantime she is preparing to land on Rai2 in a role that fans de The hunter, the popular fiction with Francesco Montanari kicks off on 20 October, they will immediately appreciate: that of the magistrate Paola Romano, a resolute woman whom Saverio Barone will not welcome by jumping for joy.

“She comes from a family of criminal lawyers: her surname is bulky, and it won’t make it easy for her to find her own way,” Linda reveals in a soft, calm voice. After winning the audience with Antonia., the biopic directed by Ferdinando Cito Filomarino, with Memories? by Valerio Mieli and with Laces by Daniele Luchetti, for Caridi the time has come for a new challenge that, as she likes it, could lead her to explore the darker sides that the directors who come across her do little to exploit, enraptured by her delicacy and grace.

Paola Romano is a strong woman, but also with a profound fragility: to seek the approval of others.
“While she will look for a way to be accepted by Barone and the work group, she will have to develop her own personal evolution and free herself from others, gaining the confidence to be able to legitimize herself”.

The hunter, at first glance, it looks like a very masculine series. Is there a desire to break the mold with your character?
«The masculine cut reflected the atmosphere of those years: there was not so much attention to the pink quotas within the institutions. Things have begun to change with Francesca Einaudi in the second season and, now, with this sort of female Baron that is Paola, a woman with a great dedication to work, but also with some head shots. In her journey, Paola understands that the best way to be successful in the things she does is to be able to appreciate herself. It is something that is also reflected in her way of dressing, in the suit she wears at the end of the series and which seems to make her understand that you don’t need to look like men to succeed ».

Have you ever had a desire for approval from others?
«Generationally, I believed that I belonged to an era in which it was outdated, but I am realizing that we have absorbed it so much that it will not be easy to get rid of it. Breaking free from external legitimacy is a very liberating process. At the level of historical evolution, I think that some fruit is giving it ».

The period in which one’s identity is sought is above all adolescence. What teenager were you?
“Restless, looking for details, both in myself and in other people. When traveling on the subway I often missed the stop because I was absorbed by others, I lost myself in their way of speaking, moving, reading. I am still very attracted to the human being ».

For his profession, curiosity is fundamental.
«It is a challenge that remains active, both for the relationship and for listening. There is a desire to understand that goes beyond mere observation ».

When did you realize that this observation could be put into practice in your work?
“When, before entering the academy, we played in company to create the characters and they told us that they didn’t have to recognize us, that we had to arrive on stage transformed”.