Matteo Martari, the boy who cries

This article is published in number 41 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until 12 October 2021

But what a straight back, and what a beautiful purity, this bastard from Pizzofalcone. How much heat in the veins, for one who was the Alligator on stage. Matteo Martari, a thirty-seven-year-old Veronese actor who believes that beauty is not his own but that of an asymmetrical like Vincent Cassel, today wears a white T-shirt that even without the wind seems to wave on his chest with zero fat mass, as a diligent tiler, as an eradicator of roots.

It comes back from a night on set The astronauts, a comedy by Alessio Maria Federici, that of Couples therapy for lovers. While on Raiuno, from next 17 October and for eight evenings, he will be a pioneer of medicine in Hearts, a script inspired by the team of cardiac surgeons who at the Le Molinette hospital in Turin, in the 1960s, amazed the world by inventing cutting-edge diagnostic tools. “I don’t know how to lie,” he says of himself. And it looks so really.

Let’s start with serious things: in your opinion, is the love story at Gf Vip between Manuel Bortuzzo and Lulù Selassié sincere or constructed by the authors?
«I don’t live on Mars and I know the subject, although the Ansa, which I read every morning, hasn’t given any updates today. But the thing intrigues me: why should it be invented? Who are they?”.

He, an athlete hit by a bullet in 2019 and confined to a wheelchair. She is a weird socialite descendant of the emperor of Ethiopia.
«Here, I hope then that the doubt does not depend on the condition of the boy. My mother has been in a wheelchair for a long time, and she and dad have loved each other for forty years, with the truest love there is. The limit, if there is a feeling, cannot be that ».

I just wanted to ask her if, in her life, the disease had ever entered.
“Not with me, thankfully. But as I said, I had it close by, in the form of a degenerative, exhausting, infinite pathology ».

Are you an only child?
“Yup”.

And how was it, with this weight, to leave Verona, go to Milan, leave them alone, chase a dream?
“It wasn’t easy. But what I owe to my parents, in addition to the example of love and dedication, is to have educated me to choose. And leaving me free to do so. “

Do you like gossip?
“Less and nothing”.

The other day there was a meme about an ex: “Miriam Leone married Paolo Carullo and not Matteo Martari”. What did it feel?
“Nothing. If they are happy, I can say to the limit that I am happy for them ».

In front of what does it turn off the brain, if it turns it off?
«I struggle, and it happens with few things: racing in a car, where it is allowed, of course. To ski. Climb. To fight ».

Struggle.
“Yup. I have practiced boxing and mixed martial arts. Now I like Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, which is made up of projections, joint levers, unity of purpose between mind and body ».

A chess sport.
“Good boy. You have to be three or four moves ahead of your opponent, knowing in advance what he will do. I do sport to help my head, certainly not for the body ».

You seem so quiet. Because?
“It’s all appearance, believe me. I have a restlessness that accompanies me every day and that I don’t know how to decipher. I realize that it comes more from external conditioning, however, because inside I am capable of living in the present. Michael Jordan explains it well
in The Last Dance: nothing can be done for the past, nothing can be done for the future. So all the better not to abandon yourself to anxiety, put your hands in the earth or on a steering wheel, and live now ».

Metaphorically speaking, you are not a runner.
“Without a direction, never. If I have it, I’ll dart. ‘

It is said of her: what a crazy face.
“As long as you don’t just say that, that’s fine by me. But I am aware that I have no merit in this regard. And the compliments, for me, are others ».

Even as a kid, at the hotel school, did they say “what a crazy face”?
“I was actually bullied at school. Everyone disliked me and I was a magnet for bad kids. I always had the heaviest jokes: once, in the mountains, they closed me on the terrace in my pajamas, at -18. Another time,
before a ski race, they filled my boots with toothpaste and I had to retire. Until in the third grade I rebelled ».

The heart does not lie, they say. And the face?
«My never. If I have a feeling I don’t know how to disguise it. I’m not strategic, and I don’t want to be ».

Soon he will leave for Basilicata on the set of Girls don’t cry. What about boys like her instead?
“Very. The more men one is, the more one must abandon oneself ».

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