New appointment with Pop Cornerthe space where sciences meet entertainment, music, cinema and culture. Today we host one of the greatest Italian actors, Toni Servilloto talk about his latest film directed by Paolo Sorrentino, Grace (seventh collaboration with the Neapolitan director later The extra man, The consequences of love, The star, The great beauty, They and It was the hand of God) and to explore how the art of acting is intertwined with psychology, time perception and politics.
The chat starts from a very delicate scientific and legal topic, the difference between euthanasia and assisted suicide. It is in this context that the protagonist of the film played by Servillo moves: a Head of State, widowed and with a Christian Democratic background, who finds himself having to sign an end-of-life law. If he doesn’t sign, you hear a torturer towards those who suffer irreversibly. If he signs, due to his Catholic morality, he feels like a murderer. In this film you don’t choose between good and evil, but “between evil and evil”. Servillo brings to the stage a man who feels responsible for the decision and who experiences a generational and intellectual clash with his daughter, also a jurist, who looks to the future while he looks to the past.
Speaking of the characters he plays, Servillo reveals an interesting background on his approach. The actor confesses that he finds it more difficult to interpret real characters compared to fictional ones. When playing a very well-known real character (as happened with Andreotti or Berlusconi), the audience already has a preconceived idea and the actor must fight against prejudice or the request for a simple imitation.
One of the most fascinating points of the interview concerns the difference between theater and cinema. Cinema is defined by Servillo as an art of fragments. It is similar to the novel, it can be enjoyed distractedly, interrupted, or watched while doing something else. Theatre, on the other hand, is a ritual that unites people. It requires audiences to gather in the same place at the same time to experience an experience in its entirety, from start to finish. Servillo underlines how theater is the only art form that forces you to take time. In an era in which social media and modern life compress time and fragment attention, theater requires you to “spend yourself”, that is, to make your time available to someone else.
The actor has no social profiles but is a reader of newspapers and paper books. According to Toni, social media works silently to make us believe we have had a full day, when in reality it was empty. His memory goes back to the boring afternoons of his childhood, spent playing with a Super Santos against a rolling shutter. That boredom, which today we tend to treat immediately as if it were a pathology, was actually a time when the head “turned on” and we were alone with ourselves.
Where does Servillo’s art come from? From a spark, listening to my mother sing Neapolitan songs while she cooked. That song was a moment of pure expression that elevated everyday life and distanced it from banality. And what is the supreme ambition for an actor who has won everything? Servillo quotes a scene from a film about Vivaldi, in which the composer tells a young violinist: “You don’t play to be praised.” True happiness, difficult to achieve, would be to make artistic expression coincide with life itself, playing (or acting) without the anxiety of judgement, ego or determination towards success.
