Alessandro Gassmann, the mattatore’s son who now plays the adult who listens

Alessandro Gassmann

Photo: Lega Nerd / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	February 24, 1965 Rome, Italy
Occupation	Actor and director
Known for	Transporter 2, Tutta colpa di Freud, My Name Is Vendetta
Awards	David di Donatello · 2 Nastro d'Argento · Premio Pasinetti · Globo d'oro · Ciak d'oro · Nastro d'Argento Grandi Serie

In Figli perduti, the first feature by a Milanese director still in his twenties, Alessandro Gassmann plays Don Claudio Burgio, the priest who meets angry boys inside Milan’s juvenile prison and offers them a bed at his Kayròs community. Presenting it in Rome, he said something few actors say on a press tour: that the older generations, “among which I obviously include mine”, should and could have done more. The part fits a pattern. A philosophy teacher, a defence lawyer in Bari, a police inspector in Naples: for years now he has been cast as the adult whose job is to listen. For the son of Vittorio Gassman, the great mattatore of the Italian stage, an actor whose whole art was to fill a room with his own voice, it is a long way to have come.

His parents, Vittorio Gassman and the French actress Juliette Mayniel, separated when he was a small child. His first film was a family affair. Still a teenager, he wrote, directed and acted in Di padre in figlio with his father, an autobiographical film about the two of them, and then trained as an actor at the Bottega Teatrale his father ran in Florence. One of his early stage roles was in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Affabulazione, a tragedy about a father consumed by his son.

The surname took longer. Born in Rome on 24 February 1965, he was registered as Gassman, with a single n. By the family’s account, his grandmother, a widow with two children, dropped the second letter in 1934 because she sensed what was coming for families with Jewish roots. In his forties Alessandro went to the registry and put it back. It was a quiet act that did not cut him off from his father’s name so much as reach back past it.

The 1990s made him popular in a form his father had also worked, the comic double act. From 1996 he paired with Gianmarco Tognazzi, son of Ugo, in Uomini senza donne, Teste di cocco and a run of comedies that the press could only read as the sons replaying the fathers. In 1997 Ferzan Özpetek’s Il bagno turco, in which he plays a Roman architect who goes to Istanbul to sell an inherited hammam and stays, gave him the first role critics kept. Advertising claimed him next. He fronted Yves Saint Laurent’s Opium and posed nude for the 2001 calendar of the magazine Max, and in 2005 he crossed into French action cinema as the terrorist Gianni Chellini opposite Jason Statham in Louis Leterrier‘s Transporter 2.

For a long stretch it was fair to ask what kind of actor sat under that surface. The buddy comedies were box-office product, and as late as 2009 he was in Natale a Beverly Hills, one of the Christmas comedies Italian critics treat as the opposite of cinema. The prizes, when they came, rewarded the reverse of the pin-up: restraint, and usually at the edge of someone else’s film. As Nanni Moretti’s brother in Caos calmo he won the 2008 David di Donatello for best supporting actor. The question has not entirely gone away: one review of Mani nude, Mauro Mancini’s bare-knuckle thriller, in which he plays Minuto, the captor who trains a kidnapped teenager to fight, found that it worked only in stretches.

The stage is where he built the second career. He directed and starred in La parola ai giurati, an Italian Twelve Angry Men, ran the Teatro Stabile del Veneto from 2010 to 2014, and turned Reinaldo Povod’s Cuba and His Teddy Bear, the play Robert De Niro had done on Broadway, into Roman e il suo cucciolo, about a Romanian heroin dealer in Rome raising his son. Most of what he has directed for the screen comes back to fathers. Razzabastarda, his first film as sole director, moved that play to the screen in black and white, with himself as Roman. Il premio cast Gigi Proietti as a Nobel-winning novelist driving to Stockholm with his grown children, Gassmann playing the son. Il silenzio grande, from a Maurizio de Giovanni play he had staged, premiered at Venice in 2021 and won him the Ciak d’oro for best director. His Eduardo De Filippo adaptation for Rai, Questi fantasmi!, was named best TV film at the 2025 Nastri d’Argento Grandi Serie.

On screen the 2010s steadied him. Francesca Archibugi’s Il nome del figlio and Ivano De Matteo’s I nostri ragazzi, two films about bourgeois families coming apart over dinner, earned him the 2015 Nastro d’Argento for best actor. In Mancini’s Non odiare he played Simone Segre, a Jewish surgeon in Trieste and the son of a Holocaust survivor, who lets a man with a swastika tattoo die at the roadside and then seeks out the dead man’s family. It won him the Pasinetti award for best actor at Venice in 2020, the role where his own family history sits closest to the surface.

Television gave him the audience. As inspector Giuseppe Lojacono in I bastardi di Pizzofalcone he became a fixture of Rai’s Naples, and the city made him an honorary citizen in 2018. Since November 2021 he has been Dante Balestra in Un professore, Rai 1’s version of the Catalan series Merlí, an unorthodox philosophy teacher. Three seasons have aired, the third ending in December 2025, and a fourth is in preparation. In March 2026 Rai 1 launched Guerrieri – La regola dell’equilibrio, Gianluca Maria Tavarelli’s adaptation of Gianrico Carofiglio’s novels, with Gassmann as the Bari lawyer Guido Guerrieri opposite Ivana Lotito. It reached the United States and Canada in August on MHz Choice as The Cases of Attorney Guerrieri and earned him a best-actor nomination at the Nastri d’Argento Grandi Serie.

He has been married since 1998 to the actress Sabrina Knaflitz. Their son, Leo Gassmann, is a singer-songwriter and actor who competed at Sanremo in 2026, the third generation of the family in front of an audience. With Roberto Bragalone, Gassmann co-wrote Io e i #GreenHeroes, a diary of environmental commitment whose proceeds go to planting trees.

Figli perduti, based on the true story of Daniel Zaccaro, a boy from Quarto Oggiaro who went through the juvenile justice system before finding Kayròs, screened in October 2026 in the Panorama Italia competition of Alice nella città, and Medusa took it for Italian cinemas during the festival. Gassmann called it “a small, important film” written, directed, acted and even shot by people in their twenties. Growing older, he said, he learns more from them than from people his own age.