Cinema often teaches us to wait.
To wait for a story to find its voice, for a character to reveal something unexpected, for a meeting to happen out of the blue. Edoardo Leo knows this well. His career has been built without haste, shaped by very different characters and by a long apprenticeship which, even today, he describes with a smile as his true journey.
“This year I’m celebrating my 33rd year of apprenticeship,” he says proudly during our interview.
And perhaps it is precisely time that best describes his journey: the years it took to understand what kind of actor he would become; those that were essential to discovering a comic streak he had never imagined he possessed; and the time needed to learn from the mistakes he made. But also the time required to choose stories capable of challenging him once again.
In Australia as a special guest of the ST. ALi Italian Film Festival, he arrives with two new films – Separate Beds (2 cuori e 2 capanne) and For You (Per te) – which take us, in very different ways, through the winding journeys of two characters forced to confront change. And Leo, whether in front of or behind the camera, seems to be continuing to search for precisely this: what he does not yet know he is capable of telling.
In For You, he plays Paolo, a father who has to come to terms with a diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. A true story, inspired by the experience of a man and the testimony of his family, which Leo followed from the very beginning, eventually also becoming a producer of the film. The choice was not accidental.
“My grandmother also experienced fairly early-onset Alzheimer’s, so I knew the subject very well and, perhaps unconsciously, it was a cathartic way of revisiting this story and talking about it with my father,” he explains, stressing how important it was to find “the right balance”.
“We had this potentially very dramatic story and we tried to turn it into a comedy.”
The narrative therefore shifts from illness to the relationship between the characters, as their roles gradually reverse. Paolo is not simply a father who progressively loses his independence:
“It is the story of a man who is about to become a child, while a child is about to become a man and becomes his father’s father,” he adds.
To enter Paolo’s painful perspective, Leo undertook a long and meticulous process. He studied videos of the real man, worked with a coach and, above all, tried to understand that grey area in which the illness is not yet completely visible.
“The most complicated part is that limbo, the moment when a person knows they are ill, but is not aware that sometimes the illness is already taking hold. It was very difficult to act in this shadowy space. I felt an enormous responsibility,” he admits honestly.
An image from the film For You, starring Edoardo Leo and Javier Francesco Leoni
But precisely this awareness, and this enormous responsibility, seem to have pushed him towards one of the things he now seeks most in cinema: risk.
“I think that, at this age and after all the years I’ve spent in cinema, my desire is to take some risks, to try to tell different stories,” he adds.
Almost as a counterpoint to Paolo’s fragility comes Valerio, the protagonist of Separate Beds: a rigorous man, accustomed to rules and to the certainty of his own convictions, who finds himself confronted by a free-spirited, unconventional woman capable of disrupting his carefully ordered world.
Two characters at opposite ends of the spectrum, exactly as Leo had imagined them.
“And then, the fun part of my job is all the studying that comes beforehand, everything I do before going onto the set,” he adds.
Curiosity has always accompanied him, eventually leading him behind the camera as well, after university, a degree in Literature, theatre and acting.
“There was a form of expression that I couldn’t channel and, at one point, I thought it was writing, which is why I enrolled in Literature. Then I discovered acting almost by chance. I really loved it, but I wanted to finish my studies.
“On the day I graduated, I defended my thesis late in the morning and performed in the theatre that evening,” he recalls.
“All those studies are present in so many of my works and in theatre productions that I have been taking around the country for many years.”
Yet he admits that he had imagined a very different acting destiny.
“I thought I wanted to play the hero, the brave policeman who saves everyone. Instead, I discovered that, despite this physique of a failed footballer, what really worked was my comic streak. I was particularly good at playing awkward characters,” he says with a smile.
“There is something inside us that we still don’t know about, and it emerges before the image we have of ourselves.”
An image from the film Separate Beds, starring Edoardo Leo and Claudia Pandolfi
It was through the popular television series Un medico in famiglia that he discovered a path he had not yet imagined. The character of Marcello gave him his “first real comedy character”.
And perhaps that is also why Edoardo Leo says he does not regret the difficult years, not even the jobs he now considers less successful.
“I would make all the mistakes I made all over again. I wouldn’t change anything, not even the bad films or some terrible television series, because it is extremely important to know what you don’t want to do and what you don’t like,” he explains.
His career, he says, was not a race towards success, but a slow process of selection, made up of attempts and awareness acquired along the way.
“Everything that has come to me has been the result of considered choices, of very deep work. In fact, the good things came after I turned forty,” he adds.
“I know very well where I started, and I know very well what led me to make certain choices.
“One year was particularly difficult financially. At the same time, I was offered a theatre tour directed by the great Gigi Proietti and a very long television series that would have lasted for years and would certainly have solved my financial problems.
“But I went on tour because I knew it would make me a much better actor, even though it wouldn’t change anything about my problems paying the rent.”
Those difficult choices eventually led him to work with some of his “heroes” — Nino Manfredi, Gigi Proietti and Ettore Scola — and taught him that there is no completely predictable trajectory in cinema.
His meeting with Ferzan Özpetek is proof of this. Özpetek saw him presenting the Dopofestival di Sanremo in 2018 and told him that he had written a character “especially for him”.
“So you cannot set yourself a fixed objective. I try to do my job as honestly as I possibly can. Then, of course, there is a series of circumstances and coincidences that happen in life.”
And one of those coincidences has brought him to Australia.
Ten days between Sydney and Melbourne — too little time to see the country “as he would have liked”, but enough to discover an audience that surprised him.
“I knew how large the Italian community [Down Under] was, but I didn’t realise they were so passionate about cinema. In the end, food and cinema are the two things that always make you feel a little bit at home,” he says.
But comedy also travels in unpredictable ways.
“In every country people laugh at a different point in the film or at a different joke. It is one of the aspects of the profession that fascinates me most, because it shows how cinema can be universal and, at the same time, deeply connected to the people who watch it.”
In Sydney, even a chance encounter reminded him of this.
A young man asked him for a photograph while wearing a football scarf, just days before the AFL Grand Final. When Leo asked how he knew him, given that he was an Italian actor, the young man simply replied:
“Everybody knows you.”
Leo recounts the story with amusement and almost disbelief.
Edoardo Leo meets the Italian community at the Sydney screening of Separate Beds. (Photo: ST. ALi Italian Film Festival)
And while he continues talking about cinema, mistakes and the future, he repeatedly returns to one word: building.
There is no sense of revenge in his story, not even towards the many rejections he has received.
“I think resentment is wasted energy. It is better to keep working and learning. Because those good things that you put out into the world, in my opinion, always come back to you,” he says with conviction.
And after 33 years of apprenticeship, Edoardo Leo does not seem to need to prove that he has arrived.
Rather, he is still interested in setting off, changing direction, meeting characters who force him to search for words, gestures and vulnerabilities he does not yet know.
And as he leaves Australia to return to a new set, promising himself a longer journey that might also take him beyond Sydney and Melbourne, the image remains of an actor who has simply learned not to hurry.
