Pierpaolo Spollon: “The normal one”

This article is published in issue 47 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until November 23, 2021

With Pierpaolo Spollon you should go to dinner at least once in your life. Between a gricia and a meatloaf, the essence of cazzaro will emerge, pardon, of the man under Doctor Bonvegna’s lab coat of Doc – In your hands, the role that consecrated him in the pandemic era and which returns in January on Rai Uno in the second (still very secret) season. Or talk to us on the phone and be told, at a certain point: “Let’s spend a moment with the video call, an absurd thing is happening” (he continues, on the smartphone screen: “All these flocks of birds … Maybe you can’t see the video, but I’m sheltering under a canopy because there is, literally, a shower of shit going on “). Or, again, try to catch him when, between the shootings of the next season of the Red door and the arrival on November 22 of Blanca (the noir series always on Rai Uno and always produced by Lux Vide about a visually impaired detective, played by Maria Chiara Giannetta, in which Spollon has an unprecedented role: but the “no spoiler” is mandatory here), it seems impossible to make him stop for a moment : «I’m going to ten thousand, I’m like a burning candle. But in January I flee to an island, I’ve already decided which one. It will cost me a fortune, but I’ve been going on like this for two years. ‘

Let’s get rid of the thorny topics right away, in this age in which touching anything is delicate, risky, perhaps impossible. In Doc she plays a legless doctor, in Blanca the protagonist is a blind person. However, where there is Spollon, there never seems to be controversy.
“And I like it very much that it is. I am happy to contribute as much as possible to normalize – provided that even this word can still be used today – certain themes. I’ve always been like this: there are photos of me that, when I was still in the nursery, I always put myself next to my partner with Down syndrome. I don’t tell it to be Mother Teresa. Well, let’s say that if Mourinho is what is considered “the Special One”, I am instead “the Normal One”, the one who seeks a way to make everyone feel good, who wants to put everyone at ease ».

In Blanca what the Americans call “casting against type” takes place: they took her and assigned her a part that was also physically different from what is expected of her. Does it also have to do with his need to escape a certain image of – allow me the expression – a boy that mothers and daughters like?
“The word ‘need’ is correct. I can’t say anything about this character, but that he wanted to dirty my image, that yes, it was a necessity. Just as it was to, in a sense, aside. Here the absolute protagonist is Blanca, certainly not me. But this role allowed me to explore other strings, and so I preferred to say no to certain proposals that came to me at the same time, to even bigger characters, just to play it ».

Is staying in what is in effect an old-fashioned “studio” – I’m talking about Lux Vide – a limit or an advantage, in this perspective of experimenting?
“An advantage, undoubtedly. A new director, who only knows you for what you did before, tends to offer you the same part; those who have already worked with you (Jan Maria Michelini, director of Blanca, he is also the author and showrunner of Doc, nda) is the first to want to bet, to think “Well, let’s try Spollon, why not”. I like not only the fact that Lux is internationalizing itself more and more, in projects (Spollon also took part in the blockbuster series Leonardo, ed) as in language, but first of all this very “factory” logic. A bit like in Cassavetes’ cinema, a director who always worked with the same actors but made them remain individuals, very distinct entities. My ideal conception of work is this: people who want to collaborate and who spend whole months together, but then each on his own path ».

The current factory and your training at the Experimental Center are decidedly Roman, but you have chosen not to attend the “cinema” scene: you have stayed in Padua, it seems to me very little worldly … Is this your way to stay free?
“I think, if anything, that dating only between colleagues is counterproductive: if you put four actors around a table, they will end up talking only about their roles, their sets … Very interesting, for heaven’s sake, but to continue training as an actor then I prefer the neighborhood bar, with ordinary people passing by. And then I need to recharge. No: I need solitude. A loneliness that I have known well since I was little: my parents, for work reasons, were often absent, I know what it means to spend hours closed in the bedroom. I needed that loneliness which, over the years, has also been atrocious, very painful. And which I now continue to search for. Not to quote philosophers who could explain it better than me, but Heidegger argued that solitude is the ideal state to find one’s authenticity. But this is how I seem to be a snob … ».

First Cassavetes, now Heidegger: after the unpublished Spollon by Blanca, do we want to launch the intellectual Spollon as well?
«But yes, let’s do it. So I can throw in another quote: “Pale Blue Dot”. A scientist (Carl Sagan, nda) shows us the photo of a dot in space surrounded by a ray of light, and that dot is the Earth: this is to say how infinitesimal our being here and now is. I know it sounds trivial, but I strongly believe in the importance of downsizing and downsizing. To lighten. I can do it because, in fact, I went deep inside myself. But now, frankly, I feel like saying that I live well ».

When I said to someone, “I need to have a chat with Spollon,” I noticed how much his name agrees with everyone. Can this pleasure for everyone also become a condemnation?
«It’s always part of the talk about the ‘Normal One’. I do not know if it is a sentence, I know that this attitude is on the balls of someone. I was recently accused of “excessive enthusiasm” on set. I don’t know what to do with it, I really think about how to make people feel good, to avoid opportunities for friction. And it’s not doing good: it’s just that I know how to be ”.