Paola Jacobbi, Autore a MANINTOWN

Big eyes, intense gaze, a nervous physicality but with a touch of a dancer’s grace that makes her different from the classic stereotype on which most actresses of Italian scene are modeled, always slaves to a conventional idea of sensuality: this is Laura Adriani, Roman and yet looks a bit like some French girls, wearing something restless and tormented, terribly sexy.

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She started when she was very young and she’s not 28 yet. She has starred in about ten films, often directed by quality directors such as Giuseppe Piccioni in Questi giorni and Silvio Soldini in Il colore nascosto delle cose. Above all, Laura has worked a lot in television, in small and medium roles in many TV dramas, a career without flashes but solid, more like a marathon runner than a sprinter, and this responds to her decisive, balanced personality.

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We have just seen her in Cuori, Auditel champion series on Rai 1, we find her again in A casa tutti bene, reboot of Gabriele Muccino’s 2018 blockbuster film. The eight episodes, written and directed by the same director, are airing on Sky and streaming on NOW from yesterday December 20. The character played by Laura Adriani is Ginevra, second wife of Carlo (Francesco Scianna) eldest son of the Ristuccia family, a family of successful restaurateurs seen from the outside, highly dysfunctional family from the inside.

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A sticky girl, Ginevra.

“She is, poor girl. She’s younger than her husband and he’s still very attached to his first wife (played by Euridice Axen, editor’s note), a very self-confident woman, very centered. But, you will see, in the course of the series, Ginevra will evolve and will reveal herself to be much more interesting than she seems at first sight”.

Now she seems to me a victim of a terrible retrospective jealousy. Are you also jealous in life?

“Not very much. I’m generally tolerant of human weaknesses. Betrayals are part of life. And of love. You cheat if you love, so everything is much more complicated. There are no black and whites. I’ve betrayed and I’ve been betrayed. I think, sooner or later, it can happen to everyone.”

I think Ginevra is so jealous of Carlo’s first wife partly because she was his mistress before he separated. She knows he is a potential cheater and is afraid of finding herself an “injured party.”

“I hadn’t thought about it, but I think you’re right. The truth is that this family is terribly conflicted and the moment she chose to stay with this man, she is in the middle of all their contradictions. But again, the further the series goes, the more surprising Geneva’s story arc will be.”

I’ll gladly wait, the series is a very successful family drama. But let’s go back to you. You’ve taken part in very popular, indeed national-popular series such as I Cesaroni. What memories do you have?

“I was young, still not very aware of many things. I had fun, I learned a lot, and if I think about it, it was an exciting and above all decisive period of my life”.

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You graduated in Psychology. I gather that if you hadn’t been an actress, you would have been a psychologist.

“Yes, I think so. And anyway, as a second job, I already do it a little bit, in the sense that having studied these things turned out to be a really useful background in my job as an actress.”

Is the world of show business full of neurotics? Are sets psychodramas even offstage?

“A little bit, yes (laughs, ed.). And then having a background in psychology helps a lot to understand the characters, to study the dynamics with others, it is a really useful background”.

In the workplace, everyone has a role. For many years, you were the little one, the mascot. What was that like?

“I admit it wasn’t always easy. I felt a bit crushed, intimidated by the presence of the adult actors. Now it’s different, also because I get more relevant roles, for example I’m shooting a new series with Francesco Arca that will probably be called L’ultimo spettacolo and here I’m the female protagonist. For me, what counts is trying to establish an equal relationship with everyone. Once, on the set, we were crazed with heat, I asked for water, someone from the production team offered to fetch it for me, and I made it a point to say that they had to bring it to everyone, not just to me”.

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It’s no longer a time for stardom.

“Not at all. This is a collective work, no one should feel left behind because they have fewer lines than someone else or because their name is not at the top of the title”.

You are also a singer, you participated in Ti lascio una canzone and you teach in the musical theatre school founded by your brother Daniele, who is a tenor.

“My brother is a real singer. I only studied singing; I don’t call myself a singer. The school is in Acilia, I led a course of acting, the students are young people and children, we put on many musicals, it is a beautiful experience and very enriching for those who teach.”

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Don’t you want to get into musicals?

“I’ve done it before, actually. I played a musical called Next to Normal a few years ago. I loved it so much because, within a seemingly light genre like the musical, it dealt with the subject of bipolar disorders. It was a brilliant and profound show that, not surprisingly, won the Pulitzer Prize in America.”

Would you still do a musical?

“The problem is that in Italy, the repertoire of musicals is very limited. They always do the same things, rarely take risks with innovative texts like Next to Normal. There would be many other super interesting ones to adapt for Italy, but here we prefer to do Grease for the millionth time. Nothing against Grease, but it’s not for me”.