When you interview someone who’s special, you realize how special they are fairly quickly. With Gianmarco Saurino, our July Cover Story, this realization came instantly.

We recently saw him in “Maschile Plurale”, and we will see him again in many other projects, including an international one, and the series “Per Elisa – Il caso Claps”, which, after its success on Rai, will be released on Netflix this month.
With Gianmarco, we talked about important choices, but most of all about connection, about how seeing ourselves through others people’s eyes could “change the world” and how much we can consider ourselves social animals.

“The goal is always the people, not the job”: because it’s important to leave a trace in this world, but to do so, we need others.

What was it like to find “Luca” again? How have you changed in these years and how has he changed?

I have definitely grown up and matured. Three years is a long time, and many things have happened in between. While filming “Maschile Singolare” (“Mascarpone”), I was simultaneously shooting the TV show “DOC – Nelle tue mani” one in the morning and one in the evening. The first chapter was magical because each of us gave all the time we had available, including nights. It was also magical because we didn’t know what the result would be, given that it was not a “low budget” film, but a “no budget” one [laughs]. However, we cared about telling this story, which we believed had a purpose.

In my opinion, Luca has changed a lot in this second chapter. The thing I like most is that we don’t see this three-year gap: in the last scene of “Maschile Singolare” we leave him shaken because for the first time he felt emotions towards someone, he, the alpha male who never has to ask, who has a very free relationship with sex. In “Maschile Plurale” his breakdown in the previous years is depicted, where he became dependent on drugs and sex because Denis’ death and Antonio’s loss made him collapse, but we find him engaged, in fact, about to get married. This is a huge change for a character who in the first film was “the man who never has to ask”.

“Maschile Plurale” comes at a very different point in my career compared to three years ago: I tried to approach it with the same joy and dedication. From a human point of view, I am a 31-year-old man and not a 27-year-old kid… It’s not a big difference, but putting that 3 as the first digit in your age has weight, it carries a load of responsibilities, even though I probably have the same type of life I had when I was 23, only my bank account has changed because I work [laughs].

However, I am certainly a more mature man now. Both my character and I have taken steps forward, and it’s nice that it’s like this.

What was your initial thought or reaction when you first read the script of “Maschile Plurale”?

It’s strange because there was a very slow approach. They had to convince us, especially me, Giancarlo [Commare], Michela [Giraud], who were afraid of the idea of making a sequel. Like it or not, it’s a bit like playing the World Cup again after you’ve won it: “Maschile Singolare” had extraordinary success for the type of product it was, for the type of contribution we gave it. It was really innovative, in a way: it’s a romantic comedy, a genre we’ve seen over and over again in a thousand ways, but it tells in a very light way about thirty-year-olds, an age group that is rarely addressed in cinema in this country, because either teen movies are made or adult stories are told. This world, which is ours, dealing with the idea of family, work, the idea of losing a job, buying a house, losing a ten-year relationship and not knowing what your place in the world is anymore, is rarely told in Italian cinema. “Maschile” never uses the LGBTQIA+ label because there’s no need, but it tells a love story between thirty-year-olds, becoming innovative in this respect. This scared me a lot, and it was a very slow approach that gradually convinced us. Moreover, the script was changed and improved several times, and we reached the final version of “Maschile Plurale” that we were already used to the idea that we would do it. Without a doubt, we were happy to return to our characters’ shoes, first of all for the audience who loved them and had so much fun, and then also because it was fun, a bit like doing TV series.

Returning to play a character after three years is almost like a new job, it’s a different kind of growth.

In this second chapter, Luca finds himself as an educator in a family home for LGBTQ+ community youth. Did you get to interact with similar realities to approach the character? How was your experience?

I didn’t have the chance to interact with them because I had just finished filming the second season of “Lidia Poët,” so the time gap between the two projects was too short to work on a series of collateral actions like entering a family home. I relied a lot on Alessandro Guida, the director and one of the writers, who already knew family home realities in Rome. The cool thing was not the preparation, but what we received after the film, namely the comments from people happy that we dealt with the theme of family homes, sharing their experiences. So, it was very nice to get to know this reality afterwards, not having had the time to do it before.

For us in general, it is very important to talk about mental health, about places where one can express oneself, and the film reminded me of this. How important is it for you, in life and in work, to create awareness?

I believe it’s very important. One of the biggest works I’m doing on myself is precisely through awareness of my person, of who I am. It sounds very hippie and rhetorical, but it’s actually quite factual. I don’t know how much through my work I can express the concept of awareness. Certainly, I can tell you that in my life at this moment there are two great themes moving together: awareness and connection, and through my work and through the person I am, perhaps the theme of connection is the strongest for me.

And how connected these two themes are, how connecting with others helps you become aware of who you are, and how we cannot exist without others!

It’s right that I am aware of who I am in my world, but it makes absolute sense that by connecting with other people’s eyes I can realize how I reflect in others’ eyes. Neither element can exist without the other. The big problem nowadays is that we probably only exist in others’ eyes because we are hyperconnected, but it is thanks to the work of awareness we do on ourselves that we can enjoy the connection with others.

“It’s right that I am aware of who I am in my world, but it makes absolute sense that by connecting with other people’s eyes I can realize how I reflect in others’ eyes.”

Speaking of connection, it comes to mind that when Johnny and I founded The Italian Rêve, what interested me most was creating connections, and I always told everyone that. In the end, I wanted to start the magazine not because I wanted to write something sensationalistic, gossip for everyone to read, but I wanted to create connections between people, move and excite myself by talking with actors or directors who surprisingly had something in common with me, who shared what I thought or, on the contrary, opened my mind.

For me, it’s a fundamental topic: I recently realized, in the great journey I’m making on myself, that for me this job is not the goal. What I truly love in my life, and not in my work, are people, stories, so for me, this job is just the means to tell these things. This awareness takes a huge load of responsibility off my shoulders: the truth is that the most important thing is to grow big, as big as possible, but only because it raises the bar of the stories you can tell. The goal is always people, not the job.

On the contrary, sometimes when we talk about these topics and acceptance, we also talk about closed places that imprison, that don’t understand. Have you ever felt trapped in something?

Yes. I believe that long seriality at some point became a prison for me from which I wanted to escape, but not because of the product, considering that I started with “Che Dio ci aiuti” and ended up doing “DOC”, which is a hugely successful series, but because it was something that no longer made me breathe, that made me physically ill, I was not happy.

It was not possible that at 30 I felt my job as something that was oppressing me, it was not possible to think that the most beautiful job in the universe for me had turned into a prison.

So, the drastic choice to leave “DOC”; many say it was a courageous choice, but it’s not about courage: courage is when you are afraid but jump anyway, I wasn’t afraid of the unknown, of leaving such a successful series, I had to do it, it was a vital request from me.

If you could give a piece of advice to Luca, as a friend, what would you tell him?

I would hug him. That’s the main thing I would do. I’ve always liked Luca because he’s someone who makes a lot of mistakes, even if he says he has the ready answer. I’ve never believed that Luca wasn’t in love with Antonio, and I like portraying controversial characters who don’t have the answers because that’s what we live every day. I enjoy the idea of a conflicted character who doesn’t know what’s right or wrong in love, just like all of us.

I would hug Luca and tell him that everyone makes mistakes in life and that the important thing is to be honest.

“I enjoy the idea of a conflicted character who doesn’t know what’s right or wrong in love, just like all of us.”

Tancredi made me think about how sometimes we give too much importance to social media. In the world we live in, where social media has its weight and where everything seems to move fast and there’s no capacity to wait, do you feel capable of waiting?

I reclaim the ability to wait.

I come from two and a half crazy months, and now I’m home and I want to stay home for a while. Over time, my friends have learned to understand that there are moments when I need to be alone and I need to get bored because I believe that boredom is the most creative thing there is. There are times when I need to tidy up and make space, not only in my house but in my head, because I think that by constantly running and being hyperconnected, there’s no more space to connect with ourselves. That’s why we need to carve out space, which paradoxically has become a job.

The other day Sorrentino was presenting a film in Rome and said: children now, after school, have to go do karate, play basketball, soccer, volleyball, and when school ends, they invented the summer camp, so when does a child get bored?

I remember when I was little, I would get bored, there were moments when I didn’t know what to do, especially if friends weren’t around… And if it rains, how do you spend the afternoon? That’s when you discover that maybe you like doing puzzles or painting or reading: I became an obsessed reader. These things are discovered when you don’t know what to do and your brain starts working. Instead, today there’s the idea of the necessity for an excess of dopamine, which is scrolling, something that gives you the illusion of informing yourself but in reality, in the end, you know nothing but the headlines of things.

It’s like that one lyric by Brunori Sas, when he says, “You want to climb the mountain and then stop at the first restaurant”: that drives me crazy. Something I often think about today is social activism, the fact that even topics that can’t be encapsulated in an Instagram story have become social, it touches me deeply and I don’t know how to handle it.

Because if even the children of Rafah can become something to be reshared, no matter how useful it can be to talk about it, there’s a way and a way to tell things and surely an Instagram story is not enough, it isn’t for the scale of values we’re talking about. Sharing maybe clears your conscience, but it doesn’t fix the world more than discussing it one evening at dinner with friends and taking the responsibility to affirm your idea, your concept, your ideology.

I remember those days when everyone was posting the exact same story about Rafah: both personally and professionally, I decided to abstain. As you say: how can you encapsulate what you think, or something so big that’s happening, in such a small content, then maybe followed by a photo of a plate of gnocchi with tomato sauce?

Exactly! That’s what drives me crazy. I saw colleagues sharing the story of the day before with the children of Rafah in the middle of the publication of the new book, the new movie… It’s another matter if you make a radical choice, deciding that if social media is a method of disseminating information, you as an actor talk only about this kind of thing. Despite claiming the right to be an artist who talks about political values, I think it’s more sensible to stay silent, even on a topic like this that has always been hot for me, because it didn’t start on October 7th like for many others, or use my job to do it. Sunday night, for example, we organized an event in Rome to talk about Gaza, or a podcast I’ve been doing with Amnesty International for two years in which we talk about rights was released.

Maybe if instead of resharing we stopped to write in a notebook how, with the job I do, I can be more useful to society, it might actually be more useful.

Luca and Antonio are trying to start their own business. At that moment you can see there are many feelings: their relationship reopening, the jealousies, but also a healthy fear of not making it, maybe even of failing, both in their personal life and in their dream. What is your relationship with failure?

I have a wonderful relationship with failure; I question myself about failure every day! [laughs]

I think it’s very scary, another reason why I told you this film has the merit of talking about thirty-year-olds, because we are in the midst of the idea of failure, we have everything and too much at stake constantly. As fascinating as teen series and films are, they have a range of action and thought that is too narrow; they have other kinds of problems we may have gone through long ago but no longer remember. The idea of work and relational failure is typical of thirty-year-olds and I’m completely in it, and I’m scared every day: of personal failure towards others, of not being present enough for the people I love, of not being able to keep all the pieces together.

The way I’m managing the fear of failure is taking the responsibility to make choices to the end and not do things I don’t want to do anymore. If in 10 years I tell myself I’ve failed, it will have been in the way I say. You can’t stop being afraid of the future, of failing: the only thing you can do is move forward. I wake up every day with impostor syndrome, but I’m also very aware of what I want to do, what I want to have, what I really love, and where I want to go. This is fundamental: I’m not afraid of failing if I know where I want to go.

I made a series about the Claps case and won a Nastro D’Argento: for me, the most important thing was knowing I could pick up the phone and call Gildo Claps because we became friends, knowing that in September he and I are going to Congo for a week to visit a clinic he opened in Elisa’s name. It’s these kinds of achievements that get my blood flowing; work is just the means.

“The way I’m managing the fear of failure is taking the responsibility to make choices to the end and not do things I don’t want to do anymore.”

By the way: on July 25, the series you mentioned, “Per Elisa – Il caso Claps,” is coming out on Netflix. I imagine it was a very intense project, which also brought you great personal and professional satisfaction, like the special award at the Nastri D’argento. How was it to immerse yourself in that project, and how was it different from all the others for you?

In my life, there’s a before and after the “Claps case”, not just as an actor, but also as a person, because the two can’t be separated.

I’ve become a different person: telling that story was not only the biggest professional project I’ve ever done, which received wonderful reviews from everyone, and was a way to showcase myself as an actor differently. On the other hand, it aligns perfectly with my idea of the job I was telling you about before, and with my idea of being human: having the privilege of telling the story of an incredible man and becoming his friend I think doesn’t happen often in an actor’s career and I don’t know if it will happen again. I’m honored and very happy. Another wonderful thing is that for the first time in my life, I’ve seen how this work can have an active role in reality: the political value of this work is rare, but it’s tangible, and the idea of seeing three thousand people in the square in Potenza asking for the closure of the Church of the Holy Trinity shortly after the series came out was moving. The idea that it was also our merit, the idea of having brought thousands of people in Italy into the Claps house through our story, that thanks to this empathic effort people understood the pain, anger, and frustration of a family that is “normal,” as extraordinary as the acts they performed were, gives me back the value of this job in its greatest and most wonderful sense.

Regarding this project, you said that “trying to recognize the humanity in the eyes of those around us would make us much more ready to understand and find the inhumanity in the things that happen to us every day”. And I loved it. Do you think if there was more empathy, there would be a “better world”?

Surely. We are social animals, so everything is based on others.

Let’s go back to the discussion we had earlier about connections, it’s always all based on others. We move for others and with others, everything makes sense thanks to others, my job makes sense thanks to others. What I said in the thank-you speech at the Nastri D’Argento was that in life we happen to be very lucky, but if instead of taking everything for granted we occasionally learned to recognize humanity and beauty in the eyes of others, it would be an empathetic effort that would make it much easier to recognize the inhumanity in the stories we hear every day. When you watch the news and hear yet another case of femicide, it would probably change your approach towards the greatest drama of this country; if you recognized the beauty in your parents’ eyes, it would probably be easier to recognize the drama of the prisons in this country; if you tried to recognize the effort a friend makes to come see you one evening at the theater, putting aside their commitments because they love you and want to be with you, it would be easier to understand that 40 people drowned in the sea where we swim.

I don’t expect that from one day to the next the news, which is a war bulletin, could make you want to change the world, rather let’s strive to recognize how lucky we are, how much beauty we have around us, how much humanity we have around us. Maybe by doing this, we can learn to recognize what it means to be inhuman, what Rafah means, what an invasion means, the war in Ukraine, without the effort of being geopolitical in any way or remotely close to what NATO, Israel, 80 years of invasion mean… There’s no need for that to be human, you just need to look into the eyes of others.

In short, I am convinced that empathy saves the world, and that theater should be taught in schools, because if you learn to put yourself in others’ shoes, you understand what it means to be a bully and what it means to be bullied.

“you just need to look into the eyes of others”

Speaking of empathy, you are also an ambassador for Amnesty International. In particular, with the podcast project “Ellissi” which talks about human rights and things that happen very, very far from us, and you said: “I say but to me, why the fuck should I care? Well, let’s try to understand together why we should care.” And how much did you care about being part of this project? How did it, if it happened, make you see things differently after reading and telling those stories?

I care a lot, because it’s always about people’s stories: I can’t help but be attached to these stories of violations. Moreover, in my way of telling these stories, I see the perfect emphasis of my work: it seems to me the best way to be an artist, rather than just being an executor. That project allowed me first of all to know these stories, because many stories I didn’t know, and then it changed me a lot to get inside them. That question I ask is very important because the thought we tend to have is: “I have my own problems, why should I care about what’s happening in Brazil or wherever, but especially what can I do”. The point is that first of all knowing is good and then, once again, the continuous empathetic effort we were talking about is a practice that I think can make us better human beings. Moreover, activism has a very practical result. The last episode of this year’s podcast was about Julian Assange, and we anticipated the episode by making some integrations because Julian has now been released: this also happened thanks to the media coverage that his story has gained over the years.

“Kabul” is the new international series you filmed in Athens, which tells the moment when embassies leave Afghanistan to hand it over to the Taliban, and you play Tommaso Claudi. I know you can’t talk much about the project, but what challenges did you face in playing him?

The series tells different stories that happened over those five days in 2021 in Kabul, and my character is more inspired by the story of this Italian guy who became consul for those days. It was the biggest challenge I’ve ever faced in my life, the most tiring project I’ve ever experienced, probably from a physical point of view. First of all, it was a project in English, and already that was an obstacle because it’s not my first language, but it was a challenge I had been waiting for a long time and I was keen to face it. Moreover, the setting was a challenge: it was a wonderful set, but a continuous test because the intensity of the scenes we were living was always high, there was never a transition scene, and they were all difficult scenes. It’s the beauty of good series, I think, that they are complex for the actors: staging the intensity brings the audience right into the story.

In one scene, for example, I throw myself into a crowd of 500 extras to go find a group of people to save, and that was probably the hardest day of my life on set. Again, the beauty passes through the sense of responsibility of the story: telling this story invests you with responsibility because some of the extras who were there with us had been there for real. Greece is one of the countries in Europe that has the most migrants being one of the first frontiers reached by sea, so on set there were people who had lived that story twice, once for real, once reliving it to remake it on screen with us.

There is a sense of responsibility in telling the lives of people: fiction is one thing, fantasy is another, it’s different if someone has lived the story for real.

How important is theater to you?

Very much. In recent years, I’ve been out of it a lot, though.

I carried on a project about migrants with Amnesty, a reading, “Rotte”, which I’ve been touring for a long time, and this past year, in the journey I’m making on myself, it has come out that I can’t stop doing theater because it’s something that does me good. So, with the company I created years ago, we are carving out time to work, and the coming years are full of theater. Let’s say these years have served to make space for us in the world and find our cinematic identity because we had somehow already created the theatrical one, and the desire to tell stories in a very precise way. We have just finished writing a new text that will debut next year, this year, on October 30, I debut at the Romaeuropa Festival in a show with Lino Guanciale, directed by Lino, we present a study at Romaeuropa, a very beautiful text written by a guy I have known for many years who won the Riccione Prize two years ago, it’s called “Flusso” a very beautiful show; next year I’m on tour with a new show by Ivan Cotroneo, who has just approached theater. The new text we have just finished writing with the company is a two-actor text, a man and a woman, and it talks about thirty-year-olds, relationships, memories, and nostalgia.

I love theater as I love cinema, but with theater, I can have a greater “power” than when I do cinema or television: I can choose what kind of show to stage, I can write it if I want, and this allows me to tell stories the way I want.

“I can’t stop doing theater because it’s something that does me good”

How much do you like writing? How important is it to you? Is it something you do every day for yourself or is it more of a work thing?

Yes, I have to say so. It’s not something I’ve started doing for long, maybe since the beginning of this year, but it does me a lot of good, and I really like writing about how I am today, where I am today, giving myself goals. Before, I only wrote for work or to analyze the projects I was doing scene by scene, but now I have my house full of notebooks in which I write about myself. A wonderful discovery. When I talk to you about the work I’m doing on myself, well, it also goes through this. 

What has been the best “fuck you” of your life so far?

You know, I’m not prone to saying “fuck you”? I think it’s because I’m learning to say no.

What book are you reading now?

I’m reading two books (because I’m one of those who reads multiple things at once): “Daisy Jones and The Six” and “Traitors to All” by Giorgio Scerbanenco, an author from the 1960s who brought noir to Italy and created a character named Duca Lamberti, a sort of commissioner with a wonderful story.

The last film you saw that stayed with you?

“All of Us Strangers”. I loved it so much, but it also destroyed me: my partner lives in London and we saw it together there, and I think I cried for 10 minutes after the screening. It had been many years since I cried so much for a film, and she cried even more because that film is about London but tells not so much about the city as about loneliness, how you can feel alone among a lot of people. I met Paul Mescal in Milan a short time ago and I told him that the film killed me, broke me in two. I’m also a big fan of Andrew Scott, I find him a huge actor who can say everything with his eyes.

What is “home” for you? What is the element/thing that makes it such?

The people you love. It’s not the place, it’s the people you are with. I, who am often around, realize that for me home becomes where I am with my partner. Or, for example, I spent two months in Athens to shoot, as I was telling you, and for me, it became home, first of all, because the Greeks are wonderful, a very welcoming people, and also because the crew I worked with was fantastic, I loved going out with them in the evening and spending time together.

So home is the others, being with others is a way to feel protected, to feel good, and, of course, the more my love for the people around me increases, the more I feel at home.

Photos & Video by Johnny Carrano.

Grooming & Makeup by Sofia Caspani.

Thanks to Andreas Mercante & Edoardo Andrini PR Talent Agency.

Total Look: Gucci