Giacomo Giorgio doesn’t need an introduction. We could list the theatre and film projects that saw him at work before his fame arrived playing the role of Ciro Ricci in the teen-cult series The Sea Beyond now available on MHz Choice (including The Happy Prince under the direction of Rupert Everett and alongside Colin Firth and Colin Morgan) or those after, but the career of Giacomo Giorgio, allow me to add deservedly, has just begun a flight that we hope will take him far towards the realization of his every dream. As The Sea Beyond, arrives on MHz Choice in North America and in Canada, Giacomo, archived the experience at the Venice Film Festival, and at the Rome Film Festival is ready to bring into our homes a story of pain, silence and injustice playing Luciano Claps in an ITV Studios and Rai Fiction co-production called For Elisa-The Claps Case, coming on Italian national TV (Rai 1) October 24th and based on the novel “Blood on the altar” by Tobias Jones that tells the intrinsic stories of the murder of Italian teenager Elisa Claps (and the discovery of her body in the church where she was killed 17 years later) and Heather Barnett.

We meet him at the XXXV Turin International Book Fair where, on a gloomy evening he gives his voice, alongside Vincenzo Ferrera (Beppe in The Sea Beyond) and Nicolò Galasso (Pirucchio in The Sea Beyond) to the characters of the book by Michele Zatta (head of Rai Fiction, The Sea Beyond and For Elisa – The Claps Case producer) “Forse un altro”, published by Arkadia. The book tells the story of Mike Raft who fears he has lost his last chance and then decides to jump out of the window of the fourth floor of a building; nothing compared to what happens to him next because “Forse un altro” is basically a love story.

The next morning Giacomo Giorgio shows up, unexpectedly, at the publisher’s stand. He arrives shortly after the opening when the influx is reduced to a few journalists, to those who love the little confusion and to the insiders. As the Oval Pavilion comes to life, the discreet interest in that boy becomes perceptible. Some teenagers recognize him and pretend random steps in front of the stand to observe him closely, and some scrutinize him from afar, but few find the courage to approach to ask for a photo or a selfie. After some shots with Zatta and Arkadia‘s literary agents, it’s time to say goodbye, bag on his shoulder, towards a new adventure.

Half an hour later I get a What’s Up message: “Ready. Call whenever you want”, so I find a corner on the terrace of the semi-quiet Oval Pavillion, I sit on the blue carpet and this journey begins. A journey in which the reflections, never superficial or obvious by Giacomo Giorgio, that deserve to be an interrupted flow of consciousness, collide with the instability of cell phone reception typical of train travels.

Let’s start by talking about the book that brought him to Turin, about that Mike Raft that seems to tell, absurd as it may seem, a story that sounds very familiar to all. “To have Mike Raft in your hands is like having in your hands a character that is all of us. He is a character who manages to be three-dimensional, sometimes Pirandellian and sometimes Shakespearean because he treats philosophical topics with self-irony. Mike Raft is us readers at different stages of our lives, a man who deals with the same characters that each of us clashes with daily: death, life, destiny and love.” After this jump into the void, Mike finds himself in front of his first travelling companion. It is a woman, in her forties/fifties who wears old and crumpled clothes, a scruffy appearance and ruffled hair: his life. Giacomo Giorgio‘s life would take on the shape of a knight if it materialized before him. In limbo, Mike has to decide whether to cross the threshold of the left door by writing the word the ends without the and he lived happily ever after, or give himself a second chance and go back, so Life and Death challenge each other with forbidden shots showing Mike different scenarios to serve their own interests. Giacomo does not need to think about it, he has very clear ideas: “an image linked to the past so a sweet memory, the image of a person, therefore, a person for whom every morning I wake up and an image linked to the possibility, therefore, the dream that I carry on since I was a child” would guarantee the victory to the Life. What about death? “There would be no images that could convince me to choose the left door and write the word end. Of course, what Mike is facing is the perpetual question; to be or not be, Shakespeare said it long ago; but, in the end, the answer is to be, despite everything and despite any kind of adversity. The pain is necessary. Life is beautiful but sometimes it can be terrifying. Although in my case death would not find cards to play, I believe that in general, the important thing is that there is a possibility of choice, always, in the right to live or in the right to die. Both choices have the same weight and the same value. What matters is everyone’s freedom.” The novel “Forse un altro” also reminds us of the importance of our promises, especially the ones we make to ourselves. Those are the ones that, from time to time, prevent us from giving up. “I happened to make myself a promise. In very complex moments when I might have wanted to change direction, I felt the weight of that promise so, almost like a foil, I kept faith with it.” If one day this novel, which was born for the theatre but with the “potential to become a great movie“, arrived in the theatre, he would have already found his Mike.

Meanwhile, Giacomo Giorgio arrives in all the Italian houses on October 24th with an ITV Studios and Rai Fiction co-production called For Elisa – The Claps Case, a mini-series signed, once again, by Michele Zatta and directed by Marco Pontecorvo. Elisa Claps’ case is one of the most widely debated crime stories. Elisa Claps left home to go to Mass on a sunny Sunday morning in September 1993 in Potenza. From that moment on, no one would hear from her until her body was found 17 years later in the attic of the church where she was last seen alive. It took years to convict the guilty party. A fundamental role in this was played by the Claps family and, above all, by Gildo, Elisa’s older brother, who was 24 years old at the time of his sister’s death and who voted his life to his sister’s case. What we will see is the story of the uninterrupted battle of Gildo Claps and of his family to shed light on the disappearance of Elisa, to bring his killer to justice and why the truth could have been obscured for so long. Giacomo Giorgio plays the role of Luciano Claps, the young brother of Elisa, nineteen at the time of her disappearance. “I am honoured to have had the opportunity to tell this story. I do not think there is any difference between those who, like Vincenzo [Ferrera who plays Elisa’s father], lived the years of discovery of the body and those who, like Gianmarco [Saurino who plays Elisa’s older brother Gildo] and me, was a few years old or had not yet been born. The actor’s work is the same, whether it is a true story or an invented story; what changes, of course, are the weight and the responsibility. When you have a real character in your hands, you feel the weight. I had the chance to get to know the Claps family, and telling a story like this is very difficult. It was a great test for me. There is a much higher responsibility so I placed myself with the utmost humility and respect towards these people trying to follow the truth as much as possible. I hope I’ve lived up to it.”

But Giacomo Giorgio is not just a TV series and big screen actor. In 2012 he joined the musical  Rent (based on the opera La Bohème by Giacomo Puccini and winner of four Tony Awards) by Jonathan Larson at the Teatro Comunale Vittorio Emanuele in Benevento under the direction of Enrico Maria Lamanna. In 2016 he staged in a theatrical show and in 2020 we found him on stage in Corpus Christi by Terrence McNally. For many actors the call of the stage is something strong that dictates the pace of a career; but for that guy who fell in love with acting as a little Pulcinella when was just 6 years old, “being an actor is already a privilege” regardless of whether you are working in front of an audience or a camera. “Of course, in certain moments, I enjoy making movies more while in others I enjoy doing theatre more, but, basically, the essential thing, for me, is to be able to do this job; that’s what makes me happy. Moreover, if a subject is beautiful, it is beautiful both on screen and in theatre. If an actor is good, he is good both on screen and in theatre. There are no small or big roles.” And if the subject is not beautiful? “As one of my old teachers used to say, even in a bad movie there can be a minute of cinema. This taught me to never judge what I am doing, but to try to give the best of me to any project.”

Giacomo Giorgio started targeted training, at a young age, first in Milan under the guidance of Michael Margotta with whom he focused on the Stanislavskij method and, immediately after, with Francesca De Sapio at the Duse International in Rome. It is thanks to this approach to the American school that, working in American productions like The Happy Prince, he realizes his strong inclination to work with the way Americans approach acting and projects; not neglecting, however, the fact that generally in Italy “we make a film with half of half of the budget” of an American production “in half of half of the time”, and it is the time that makes the difference because “the little time available forces you to run and therefore does not allow you to deepen certain aspects. It’s not about better or worse anyway. I just realized that for me, for the studies I’ve done, the American methodology is very satisfying, it allows you to give a 100% yield. I saw it in Colin Firth and Rupert Everett. I recognize this difference because in Italy, since there is no such culture of method, or at least there is less, we can still be masters in other aspects. I think for example of Vittorio Gassmann, who is a master of prose like no other”. But Giacomo Giorgio has the infamous American (or Great Britain)dream? He actually dreams of a golden statuette… he reveals this dream with a slight inclination of the voice, to remove any doubt (which anyway would never have been born) of presumption. “I dream of a career like Mastroianni’s one, that is that of an Italian actor who managed to bring his Italian spirit to the world, both in America and in France,… who managed to reach the hearts of these people no matter what continent they belonged to.”

When we watch a film, very often we meet characters that we would have liked to play and, those who follow him on social media know, that there is a film by Bertolucci that has a special place in Giacomo‘s heart so, walking through the streets of Paris last April, he pretended to be Paul in Last Tango in Paris. Then, in addition to Bill “the butcher” in Gangs of New York, like every boy who has been a child, he can not hide the desire to play the role of his favourite superhero, even at the cost of a disastrous fall from the bunk bed, so who if not Christopher Nolan‘s Batman?

As we said before, a versatile actor like Giacomo can not ignore the dream of being able to bring to the theatre some of the famous roles of the scene. “To not give you the banal answer I give you a less banal but always banal one. It’s clear that when you deal with great authors it’s always a dream, right?! But I would like to bring on stage the character of Domenico Soriano in Filomena Marturano by De Filippo; but also… Macbeth. Not that Hamlet is outnumbered, but it is really too obvious as an answer. Macbeth was probably my first love play.”

But, nowadays, what does it really mean to be an actor? Here is a thought by Giacomo Giorgio that we embrace completely. “Being an actor is a profession. Right now, singers become actors, not actors become actors, and it can’t be this way, because being an actor is a profession, actually. You study to do this job and people change their lives to do it. Even where there is a natural talent, it must still be nourished together with a lot of studies because otherwise, the talent is useless. I’m really baffled by this. There is another thing that, lately, I have found destabilizing and that I live daily on my skin. Paradoxically, when people stop me to take pictures etc., children and teens are much more kind, attentive and authentic than their parents. This encourages me even more to pursue my career.” 

Between these words is hidden the fateful question: why are you an actor? “Well, being an actor for yourself, for your own glory is not enough. You must do it for the social good of the world. The actor is the oldest profession in the world, and not by chance; but because a human being goes to the theatre, goes to the cinema and looks at another human being and learns to be human. Learn to say I’m like him, I’d like to be like him, I’m not like him but I learn from who I am, … that’s why it is the oldest profession in the world and, therefore, everything I see in the world around me and that I explained in the previous answer to you pushes me, more and more, to ask myself the right question that actually is not a question, and that is: ok, I have to be an actor, I have to do this job because I really want to communicate something, and not for a sense of glory that ends at some point. I wonder how, the great powers of this wonderful machine that is cinema, do not realize and allow this violence against this profession.”

After all, an actor has the responsibility of being a “sea beyond” for people who go to the cinema, to the theatre, or who turn on the television in the evening… “The luck of having made such a successful series like The Sea Beyond is only one, which is not to be stopped by people, to be acclaimed, … but the opportunity, on the agenda, to meet people and live extraordinary experiences that otherwise, in a normal situation would not be lived. I think, among many, one particularly touching moment. The encounter with this blind guy who tells me: but, according to you, what is the sea, because I have never seen it. Obviously, back there I could not give any kind of answer but, in that instant, I understood the importance of my profession. In my opinion, the goal is to bring the sea a metaphorical meaning in people’s lives; for those who have never seen it, for those who cannot see it, for those who live in an economic condition that prevents them from being able to see it, for those who dream of it, for those who are oppressed by other conditions. Surely cinema has enormous power. When I was a child I experienced complicated moments in life and cinema saved me many times. At least for those two hours, I was someone else, even a superhero like Batman. It gave me courage, it made me dream. Many times great films have influenced me not only those two hours, but whole weeks or even a lifetime. This great power of cinema is what I hope, in my small way, to be able to return when I play something. However, I would like to stress that for me, cinema cannot be educational. Cinema is cinema; tells a story; in a movie, you can tell the good or the bad. For example, as far as I’m concerned, The Sea Beyond does not tell the absolute evil; tells the good, the evil; says that there is neither good nor evil, but that there are people who are born in a way and that somehow, based on the education and the world they are surrounded by growing up, are led to a certain type of life. If it is wrong The Sea Beyond, then, with a super comparison but just to be clear, are wrong The Good Father, Scarface, or Casablanca with Humphrey Bogart smoking a cigarette a minute. People started smoking because of Humprey Bogart? Of course not; that’s just a film that deals with telling a story; then it is up to the audience to choose what to understand and what to bring into their lives.”

Being in the middle of the International Book Fair and having noticed from the pics shared on social media his passion for reading, we can not help but ask Giacomo Giorgio what kind of reader he is. For example, if we had not kept him for an hour on the phone to tell you these lines, which book would keep him company on the train? “The authorized biography of Marlon Brando. They asked me the other day what are the things that I like the most and I have to tell you that, lately, unfortunately, or fortunately, I read a lot of scripts and so now my reading is based on scripts and theatre plays, so many dialogues and many images. Besides these, my readings travel on a thread that binds them; are all stories linked by a strong sense of revenge and justice, … I’m talking about The Count of Monte Cristo by Dumas, Papillon by Henri Charrière… and that’s why I dream of playing Batman. Then there are classic, absolute masterpieces that I read more than once because they make me think; for example, The Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway who is an author I love very much; I love poetry, especially Leopardi’s. There are readings that can be given to poems or philosophical poems, very different from those that want us to believe. Saturday Night in the Village by Giacomo Leopardi, for example, is very different, if you look at it carefully from what it means; or, further back, the Oedipus Rex by Sophocles… we could talk about it for hours, the fact is that, in my opinion, at some point, masterpieces were taken and were completely crippled; but if you read well and if you think carefully, you can find out things you didn’t think of. Now, I didn’t discover them because I’m an extraordinary entity but because, as an actor, playing and not just mentalizing, I can discover, just on a sensory, perceptive level, some deeper things. The Oedipus Rex, for example, was the reason for a big fight in school while I was attending Letters and Philosophy University, because they say that Oedipus blinds himself when he discovers that he has slept with his mother. That’s not true at all for me. I think, instead, that Oedipus blinds himself because, like any human being, he can only approach and hallucinate himself at the door of truth through intellect, thought, and philosophy; but he can never know the truth. Since Oedipus is not certain that she really is his mother, he comes to her and finds himself facing the truth, that is, the woman who conceived him dead, therefore, at that point he blinds himself because the truth is not outside you but inside you. Even Narcissus was demonized because he mirrored himself, looked at himself, and liked himself and, as a sin, this led him to drown. But it’s not true at all, because the word narcissus comes from narcotic and he becomes a narcissus flower. Narcissus is a good character. Men have to be narcissus because being narcissus means searching for your true self. Who am I? If I question myself, then I am in a state of narcosis that allows me to approach, more or less, and to understand my true self. This, by the way, happens with cinema and theatre; that’s why there’s a very dark room. When the room is dark you, the viewer, find yourself in this kind of bubble of waking-sleep condition that does not allow you to perceive the time that is passing and you discover yourself in front of a movie. Narcissus came to us according to the Roman myth that if I mirror myself, I drown and I die because different cultures and religions did not want to allow the knowledge and the consciousness of the true self. My wish to myself and to the world is: be narcissus.”