Edoardo Leo gained 22 kilos to escape the comedy that made him a star

Edoardo Leo

Photo: Vincenzo De Francesco from Roma, Italia / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	April 21, 1972 Rome, Italy
Occupation	Actor and film director
Known for	Perfect Strangers, I Can Quit Whenever I Want, I Can Quit Whenever I Want 2: Masterclass
Awards	Nastro d'Argento collective award to the cast of Perfetti sconosciuti · Nastro d'Argento special award · Nastro d'Argento special award to the FolleMente (shared)

To play Iago, Edoardo Leo spent a little more than three months eating pasta at lunch and dinner, every day, until he had put on twenty-two kilos. “I wanted to free myself from the image of the handsome guy with broad shoulders who does glamour photos in a tuxedo. I wanted to destroy it,” he told Il Messaggero. Losing it again took a year, which he called hell. The film was Non sono quello che sono, his own version of Othello, spoken in Roman and Neapolitan dialect and turned into the story of a man who kills his wife. He wrote it, directed it and cast himself as the villain.

In the same interview he drew the line he has been walking for most of his career: “I don’t want to stay confined in the golden enclosure of comedies, which, let’s be clear, I still love.” He meant both halves. Two decades of popular comedy carried his face abroad. What he resists is the fence. Italian audiences, who have rewarded him most generously inside it, keep putting it back up.

He was born in Rome on 21 April 1972 and grew up in Roma 70, a residential quarter of the city. After a literature degree from La Sapienza in 1999, he built his early career on stage, moving between Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida and contemporary texts, among them a stage version of Ettore Scola’s Dramma della gelosia directed by Gigi Proietti, who became his point of reference. Television made the face familiar first, through the part of Marcello in Un medico in famiglia.

He did not wait for the industry to hand him a lead. Diciotto anni dopo, which he wrote, directed and starred in, brought him David di Donatello and Nastro d’Argento nominations for best new director. A small part in Woody Allen’s To Rome with Love followed, then a second film as director, Buongiorno papà, opposite Raoul Bova and Marco Giallini.

The turn came with Sydney Sibilia’s Smetto quando voglio in 2014. Leo played Pietro Zinni, a neurobiologist on a precarious contract who, once the university drops him, assembles a gang of unemployed academics to make and sell a drug that is still technically legal. The role earned him a David nomination for best actor, and the film grew into a trilogy that closed in 2017. A year after the first instalment he directed Noi e la Giulia, adapted from a Fabio Bartolomei novel, which collected seven David nominations and won the David Giovani.

Then came Perfetti sconosciuti. In Paolo Genovese’s dinner-party comedy, where seven friends agree to share every message and call that reaches their phones during one evening, Leo was Cosimo, the newlywed with the most to hide. The whole cast shared a Nastro d’Argento, and Guinness World Records lists the film, known in English as Perfect Strangers, as the most remade in history, with 24 versions in other languages by early 2024.

Those years fixed an image that has outlived them. The Roman everyman, quick, likeable and slightly out of his depth, became the part producers knew how to sell, and Leo’s own films as director, Che vuoi che sia and Lasciarsi un giorno a Roma, stayed close to that register. The numbers explain why. Non sono quello che sono premiered at Locarno in 2023 and reached Italian cinemas only in November 2024. Three months later Genovese’s FolleMente, a romantic comedy in which the voices inside two people’s heads fight their way through a first date, took 4.07 million euros in its opening weekend, the best start for an Italian film since the pandemic. At the Nastri d’Argento that June, the best comedy actress award went to his co-star Pilar Fogliati; Leo shared a special prize with the rest of the ensemble. His darker work and his biggest hits live in two different economies, and only one of them pays for the other.

He has kept widening the range anyway. Ferzan Özpetek cast him opposite Stefano Accorsi in La dea fortuna, and he voiced Timon in the Italian version of Disney’s The Lion King. In 2021 he made Luigi Proietti detto Gigi, a documentary on his mentor that received a special Nastro d’Argento. In Alessandro Aronadio’s Era ora, released on Netflix as Still Time, he played Dante, a workaholic who keeps waking up a year later. On Rai 1, Il clandestino made him Luca Travaglia, a former Rome police officer who resurfaces in Milan as an unlicensed investigator after an attack kills his partner; the series opened in April 2024 to about 3.8 million viewers.

The recent work leans toward the material his comedies kept at arm’s length. Per te, again directed by Aronadio, cast him as Paolo, a father in his forties diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s, drawn from the real story of Paolo Piccoli and his son Mattia, whom the Italian president named an Alfiere della Repubblica in 2021. It premiered at the Festa del Cinema di Roma and reached cinemas on 17 October 2025, co-produced by Alea Film, Leo’s production company. Alea also produced Guido Chiesa’s Piccolo miracolo, adapted from another Fabio Bartolomei novel and released in June 2026 after Greta Scarano won best actress at Taormina.

The comedies have not stopped: 30 notti con il mio ex paired him with Micaela Ramazzotti, and 2 cuori e 2 capanne with Claudia Pandolfi. On 16 October 2026 Se ami qualcuno dillo opened in Italian cinemas, the directing debut of the actor and novelist Marco Bonini, adapted from his own book. Leo, who also produced it, plays Sergio, a man who collapses when he is caught cheating, falls into a coma and wakes with the mind of a child in an adult body, forced to learn everything again. Il Foglio found the ending predictable from the start, but the premise, a grown man who has to be taught feeling from scratch, sits close to the question Leo keeps asking of his own image.

Away from the set, Leo married Laura Marafioti in 2000; they have two children, Francesco and Anita. He sits on the board of Una Nessuna Centomila, the Italian foundation against violence against women, the same subject his Othello put on screen.

The next date brings him back inside the fence. FolleMente – Capitolo II began shooting in Rome in October 2026, with Leo and Fogliati returning as Piero and Lara, and 01 Distribution has set its release for 25 February 2027. The sequel to his biggest hit will tell Italian distributors what they already believe about Edoardo Leo. What Alea Film chooses to make with that money will say what he believes.

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Tags: actors, Italian cinema, Edoardo Leo, Per te, Smetto quando voglio, FolleMente

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