Cristiano Caccamo, the actor Italian casting called too pretty to play anyone’s son

Cristiano Caccamo

Photo: Cinemio / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	March 21, 1989 Taurianova
Occupation	Actor

Before he got any part that mattered, Cristiano Caccamo kept coming second. Casting directors had a stock reason for it, which he later repeated to Rolling Stone Italia with a laugh: he was “too oriental, too pretty” to play anyone’s son. The face that lost him those auditions is the one Italian network television then put in front of millions of viewers a week, and the one Prime Video has since built a romantic comedy around. His career has yet to settle whether that face is capital he spends or a ceiling he has to act his way through.

He comes from Taurianova, a small town in the province of Reggio Calabria, and he is the son of the poet and writer Michele Caccamo. At fifteen he left for a state boarding school in Assisi. He has said he had no plan at the time; he was simply fed up with the south and wanted to study abroad, and his father talked him down to Umbria. University in Rome followed, English and Russian, of which he admits to keeping roughly three Russian words.

Acting was his father’s idea too. Driving towards Trastevere, Michele Caccamo suggested a drama course; his son said he would be too embarrassed. He was, at first, and had to resit acting. Working alone with a teacher changed his mind, and a year later he got into the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, Italy’s national film school. A soldier’s bit part in the play Ciechi came in 2010, then small film roles, then a first lead in Cenere, as a rebellious street artist.

Television is where the audience found him. In 2015, at twenty-six (he was born on 21 March 1989), he played Cosimo, the son of a fugitive, in Questo è il mio paese, and Quinto, a shy stockroom clerk, in The Ladies’ Paradise. Then came the two institutions of Rai fiction: a young heart surgeon in Che Dio ci aiuti and Giovanni Santucci, fiancé of Captain Anna Olivieri, in the eleventh season of Don Matteo. Ricky Tognazzi cast him opposite Luisa Ranieri in La vita promessa. Caccamo has done the arithmetic of that exposure himself: a successful film might reach four million people, while a television drama reaches six million an episode, and “you enter people’s homes”.

The cinema lead arrived with My Big Gay Italian Wedding, Alessandro Genovesi’s comedy in which he played Antonio, the man whose proposal from Salvatore Esposito’s Paolo forces a meeting with the family. It opened third at the Italian box office in March 2018, with about 952,000 euros from 369 screens.

In 2019 he was a Campari ambassador, served drinks as a bartender in Matteo Garrone’s Negroni short Entering Red beside Ana de Armas, and told interviewers he wanted a Netflix series, “I say it in every interview”. Netflix obliged. Under the Riccione Sun cast him as Ciro, a southern boy who wants to sing and ends up a lifeguard, and he joined the third season of Summertime. On Prime Video he turned up as himself in Celebrity Hunted and in the third edition of LOL – Chi ride è fuori, and as Edoardo in Sono Lillo, a series that made the comedy shortlist of the Nastri d’Argento. He also published a novel, Chiedimi la luna, with HarperCollins.

The price of that visibility is legible in the filmography. Between 2021 and 2023 the cinema work runs in a single register: Una famiglia mostruosa and its sequel Un matrimonio mostruoso, Bla Bla Baby, La donna per me, Le mie ragazze di carta, commercial comedies in which he is usually the handsome complication. His public manner, self-mocking and allergic to taking himself seriously, is exactly what makes him good company on a reality format and easy to cast as the attractive boyfriend. It is harder to say what a director would get by asking him for weight, because for most of a decade few of them did.

Sergio Rubini did. In Leopardi – Il poeta dell’infinito he cast Caccamo as Antonio Ranieri, the Neapolitan friend who shared the poet’s last years and through whose account the whole story is told. The miniseries played out of competition at Venice in 2024, with Caccamo billed second behind Leonardo Maltese, and drew about 4.1 million viewers on Rai 1 in January 2025, while critics and viewers quarrelled over Rubini’s youthful, hunchback-free poet. Caccamo argued for his character against the usual reading: Ranieri is remembered, he said, as someone who took advantage of Leopardi and appropriated the Operette morali, “but in reality he was a great defender”. It was the first role in which his reading of a man mattered more than his looks.

The romantic lead has not gone away. No Place to Be Single, Laura Chiossone’s adaptation of Felicia Kingsley’s best-seller, reached Prime Video worldwide on 8 May 2026, with Caccamo as Michele, a Milanese heir who wants to sell a Chianti estate to build a golf course, opposite Matilde Gioli, his partner from Bla Bla Baby. He summed Michele up to Sorrisi with a word the magazine had to truncate. Off set he runs Nena, a restaurant in Rome’s San Lorenzo district, and has said a second, in Milan, is on the way.

The next test is closer to home. Since 21 September he has been shooting Madre Terra – Il segreto delle origini for Canale 5 across Calabria, directed by Cinzia TH Torrini, as Antonio opposite Elda Pardo’s Caterina, a scientist raised in Germany who returns to run a trial of a bergamot-based cancer drug and finds a buried family history instead. Six evenings of 100 minutes are due next season. More than twenty years after he left the region because he was bored of it, Caccamo is back in it to carry a prime-time saga, and the question that casting directors once answered for him, what he can play beyond pretty, is now his to answer on screen.

Tags: actors, Italian cinema, Cristiano Caccamo, Matilde Gioli, Under the Riccione Sun, My Big Gay Italian Wedding