My Brilliant Friend 4, here is the cast

My Brilliant Friend Of Elena Ferrante has stimulated a kind of immediate devotion that rarely greets literary novels these days. The frenzy has only increased with the publication of the next three books in the eponymous novel series, which traces the troubled friendship between Lila and Lenù from the girls’ impoverished childhood in 1950s Naples through their middle age (two of the four books were recently included in the New York Times of the 100 best books of the 21st century, one at 80th and the other at 1st place). The fact that Ferrante published the books under a pseudonym only added to the aura of mystery.

When HBO announced a TV adaptation, some fans feared it would be a pale imitation of Ferrante’s prose. However, the series has achieved the same critical acclaim as the books. The Italian director and screenwriter Saverio Costanzohand-picked by Ferrante herself, managed to stay true to the spirit of the novels while conjuring up a vivid, intense television world for Lila and Lenù. This involved an exceptional casting process (the producers auditioned nearly 9,000 Neapolitan children) and the construction of a complex 23,000-square-meter set to represent the girls’ crumbling neighborhood.

By Eduardo Castaldo.

By Eduardo Castaldo.

Over the course of the first three seasons of the series, the girls form a bond that is both enchanting and destructive. Even when their paths diverge (Lenù leaves Naples and becomes a famous writer, while Lila stays home, repressing her extraordinary intelligence), the two friends remain locked in an emotional tug of war. As Ferrante herself previously told VFfemale friendships «are an unknown land, especially for ourselves, a land without fixed rules».

The final 10-episode season of My Brilliant Friend will finally be released on September 9 (at 9:00 p.m. EST, corresponding to 3:00 a.m. on September 10 in Italy) on HBO and streaming on Max, picking up more or less where the third season finale left off: in 1980s Italy, in a turbulent context of political violence and social upheaval. All 10 episodes are directed by the director Laura Bispuriwhich sought to characterize the latest chapter of the series for naturalism and emotional intimacy. A new cast was also called to replace the young stars of the series Margherita Mazzucco (Lenù) and Gaia Girace (Lila), who played the girls in the first three seasons. Taking their place are Dawn Rohrwacher (The chimera, Happy Lazarus) as the bespectacled intellectual Lenù (now known mostly by her full name, Elena) and Irene Maiorino (Gomorrah) in those of the fickle Lila.

Rohrwacher is not Mazzucco’s double, but to the creators of the series she seemed like a natural choice because she has been providing the voiceover for the adult Elena since the first episode of My Brilliant Friend. Costanzo says Rohrwacher is “a great actress, perhaps the greatest we have in Italy,” and says that even if she doesn’t exactly resemble the image viewers have of Elena, “Alba knows her soul.” Maiorino, on the other hand, is very much like an adult version of Girace. “But somehow she offers a different version of Lila, without her freshness,” Costanzo says. In the past, “Lila blackmailed everyone with her beauty, which is her weakness, because in my opinion she never really believed in herself like Elena did.”

The third key member of the revamped cast is Fabrizio Gifuni as Nino Sarratore, a schoolmate of Lila and Elena who has turned into a reckless intellectual. Nino has had intimate relationships with both friends, and at the end of the third season he distanced Elena from her husband and children. “Fabrizio is really brave, because being Nino Sarratore in the fourth season, after we know how much everyone hates him, is a real challenge!” says Costanzo with a big smile. “You understand, through Fabrizio, what it means for a man not to be what everyone expects him to be. I know how much he worked to love this character, which is not easy… to make him human, to make him real.”

Costanzo began developing the series in 2016. Nearly nine years later, he has yet to meet the mysterious Ferrante. “In the first season, she wrote the scripts with us,” he says. “I asked her what she thought of some of the actors, and it wasn’t the right choice. She’s not a director and she has her own idea.” [dei personaggi]so it’s hard for a writer to get involved. And then she’s a kind of ghost, so you can’t really argue with her.”

Ferrante continued to collaborate on the scripts, but this season she was a little less involved. Costanzo speculates that it depends on the fact that Bispuri, a female director, was in charge of the series. “I remember that, when she shot The Dark Daughter, Maggie Gyllenhaal told me that Ferrante sent her an email saying, ‘Whatever you do, it’s okay because you’re a woman and I respect what you have to say.’” That attitude encouraged Bispuri to put her own creative stamp on the season. “Laura was free to experiment with the grammar of the show and I really appreciated how she did it. She doesn’t want it to be like any other show, she wants to be herself,” Costanzo says, comparing it to the way the character of Elena creates her own literary style. “It’s exactly the story of My Brilliant Friend».

Season four finds Elena struggling to integrate the different elements of herself. There’s the poor girl who spoke a rough Neapolitan dialect; the ambitious feminist writer who made a name for herself in Milan’s intellectual circles; the wife and mother trapped in a domestic prison; and the sensual creature seemingly willing to give up everything for her first crush, Nino. Is Nino just a pawn in Elena and Lila’s relationship, or something more? Costanzo suggests that, at first, Elena needed Lila “to be her energy, her fuel”—after all, it was Lila’s writing that inspired Elena to become a writer. “After she’s rid herself of Lila, she needs her fuel to be Nino. Maybe, to have the strength to write a book like My Brilliant Friendneeded to prove herself and be noticed by him. That’s the kind of mystery that draws these characters to each other.”

At the beginning of the new season, Elena makes the same point: “Even though I was writing and thinking only about women’s autonomy, I didn’t know how I would have done without her body, her voice, her intelligence.” According to Bispuri, this is an important conflict for Elena in the fourth season: “She writes about feminism, but in her private life there is the problem of Nino.” He is what today we would call a false feminist ally. “I think Nino is the most feminist thing Ferrante has done in the books, because I personally know many women (intellectuals and otherwise) who believed in men like Nino Sarratore. I think that, watching this season, every woman will recognize this type of man.”

Lila, meanwhile, is busy sabotaging herself in other ways. While Elena, at first, is a weak child who grows stronger, Lila starts out as a force of nature who instead becomes increasingly fragile as an adult. “This season, she sets up a small IT company in the neighborhood,” says Bispuri. Furthermore, Lila finds herself further entangled with the Solaras, the local mobsters who have been persecuting the girls since childhood.

The series may be an unsentimental journey, but for those behind the scenes (not to mention those watching) it will be difficult to say goodbye to the women of My Brilliant Friend. “When you lose someone who was so important to you, that person stays with you,” says Costanzo. “My Brilliant Friend taught me things I didn’t know about myself. I am who I am now because of Elena, Lila, and Elena Ferrante, and I think many readers around the world feel the same. They will never forget them, nor will they forget what they experienced through them.”