fri 13/12/2024

Vincere Special 2: Interview with Filippo Timi | reviews, news & interviews

Vincere Special 2: Interview with Filippo Timi

Vincere Special 2: Interview with Filippo Timi

Italy's electric actor - now playing the young Mussolini - tells his astonishing story

Combustible and magnetic: Filippo Timi as a rebellious novitiate in 'In Memory of Me'

Filippo Timi plays the young Mussolini of Marco Bellocchio's Vincere as a glowering, virile force of nature. Watching this and his other recent films, it was hard not to think of the Brando of the early 1950s. Timi, too, combines bullish masculine power and delicate sensitivity - he's combustible and magnetic. I was still more sure he was someone special when Gabriele Salvatores, who directed him in As God Commands, mentioned that Timi has a terrible stammer and eyesight so bad he's "almost blind. He can't see and can't speak - the two things an actor needs most," Salvatores said. "But he has an iron will."

Filippo Timi plays the young Mussolini of Marco Bellocchio's Vincere as a glowering, virile force of nature. Watching this and his other recent films, it was hard not to think of the Brando of the early 1950s. Timi, too, combines bullish masculine power and delicate sensitivity - he's combustible and magnetic. I was still more sure he was someone special when Gabriele Salvatores, who directed him in As God Commands, mentioned that Timi has a terrible stammer and eyesight so bad he's "almost blind. He can't see and can't speak - the two things an actor needs most," Salvatores said. "But he has an iron will."

When I'm acting I don't stammer any more. The work is five times harder. But you put more into it and you get more out

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