Alessandro Borghi, the actor whose body only follows orders when the camera is running

Alessandro Borghi

Photo: Martin Kraft / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	September 19, 1986 Rome, Italy
Occupation	Actor
Known for	On My Skin, Don't Be Bad, Suburra
Awards	David di Donatello · Jury Prize, 75th Cannes Film Festival (The Eight Mountains, 2022) · David di Donatello Best Film (The Eight Mountains, 2022) · Nastro d'Argento · Nuovo Imaie Talent

There is a paradox at the center of Alessandro Borghi’s career. The actor who trained himself to lose twenty kilos, who spent months in the company of Rocco Siffredi preparing to inhabit his entire life on screen, who submerged himself in the criminal hierarchies of Rome to play a man called Numero 8 — this same actor cannot fully control his own body when he is not working. Borghi has Tourette syndrome, a neurological condition that produces involuntary motor tics. The tics, as he revealed in April 2023, disappear the moment he begins to act.

He was born in Rome in September 1986, and the city’s periphery — Ostia, the borghetti, the particular desolation of its outskirts — would eventually become the landscape of his most important early work. Before any of that, he spent two years at Cinecittà as a stuntman: invisible, doing physical work inside other people’s scenes, a body substituting for a body on sets where the credited actors received the recognition. It was, in retrospect, a peculiar apprenticeship for a man who would go on to make his own body the central argument of his art.

The transition from stunt work to credited roles happened gradually, through minor television appearances in series like Distretto di polizia and Don Matteo, before two films in 2015 broke the trajectory open. In Claudio Caligari’s Non essere cattivo, shot in Ostia and released posthumously — Caligari died before the film’s Venice premiere — Borghi played Vittorio, one half of a friendship that turns corrosive under the weight of drugs, masculinity, and the specific desolation of a Roman periphery that the state had effectively abandoned. The same year, Suburra cast him as Aureliano “Numero 8” Adami, the young man inheriting a criminal empire in a film that spawned three seasons of the Netflix series Suburra: Blood on Rome (2017–2020). Both roles established a pattern: Borghi gravitates toward men in environments where the system has already broken its implicit promises to them.

The film that made his reputation durable was On My Skin (2018), Alessio Cremonini’s reconstruction of the final seven days of Stefano Cucchi — a 31-year-old Roman building surveyor who died in police custody in 2009 after a beating the authorities suppressed for years. To inhabit Cucchi, Borghi lost approximately twenty kilos in under three months. The film won him the David di Donatello Award for Best Actor. When Borghi accepted the award, he stated it belonged to Stefano Cucchi. The performance was praised not for the physical transformation as spectacle but for what the diminishment revealed: the slow bureaucratic humiliation of a body the state had already decided was a problem to manage, not a person to protect.

After the international Sky Atlantic and Netflix production Devils (2020–2022), in which he played high-finance operative Massimo Ruggero opposite Patrick Dempsey, Borghi returned to Italian arthouse terrain with The Eight Mountains (2022), co-directed by Felix Van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch, adapted from Paolo Cognetti’s novel. Playing Bruno, the shepherd who remains in the mountains while his childhood friend flees to the city, he co-anchored a film that won the Jury Prize at the 75th Cannes Film Festival and four David di Donatello awards, including Best Film. His co-lead was Luca Marinelli, with whom he had first worked in Non essere cattivo; the reunion carried the weight of a creative relationship that had never fully needed to announce itself.

Then came Supersex. Released on Netflix in March 2024, with Borghi playing Rocco Siffredi across seven episodes he also associate-produced, the series set out to dramatize the biography of Italy’s most famous adult film star: the Catholic origins in Ortona, the international machinery of pornography, the man underneath the persona. The project divided critics. Borghi’s commitment was unambiguous. What some critics challenged was whether the show — despite its evident ambitions — ever achieved enough psychological distance from its subject, whether a series about a man who made his body into an industry could resist functioning, in places, as an extension of that industry’s promotional logic. These are not trivial objections, and they are not resolved by the fact that Borghi’s performance contains real empathy. A thoughtful performance inside an unresolved project is still an unresolved project.

The Tourette disclosure, made in April 2023 on the podcast Bsmt, arrived with some precision. The form Borghi has is the motor variety — not the verbal form with which the condition is most commonly associated in popular imagination. The tics correspond to emotional peaks: extreme happiness, stress, fatigue, discomfort. And they stop when he acts. He described acting as the only state in which his body does exactly what he asks. The remark illuminates something that his filmography makes available in retrospect: the extreme physical preparations are not secondary to his craft — they are the mechanism by which he achieves the one form of unconditional control he knows. A man whose body disobeys him in ordinary life has built an entire career on mastery of that body in front of a camera.

In early 2026, production began on Nessun Dolore, directed by Gianni Amelio, with Valeria Golino and Valerio Mastandrea. The film follows a man who runs a used bookshop in central Rome and becomes obsessively involved in tracing the fate of a foreign child after a road accident. It is Borghi’s first collaboration with Amelio, one of the most rigorous living directors in Italian cinema. The film is scheduled for release on September 24, 2026.