Elio Germano, the Italian actor who keeps playing the men history argued with

Elio Germano

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

Born	September 25, 1980 Rome, Italy
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Suburra, Rose Island, Crime Novel
Awards	Cannes Film Festival · Berlin International Film Festival · 6 David di Donatello

Elio Germano has built a career out of men who were at odds with the Italy around them. He has been Giacomo Leopardi, the hunchbacked poet who mocked the optimism of his century, and Antonio Ligabue, the painter whom the villages along the Po treated as the local madman. He has been Enrico Berlinguer, the Communist leader who tried to carry his party into government and died before he could. This autumn he is in Tuscany playing Galileo Galilei for the director Roan Johnson. And yet the actor is no specialist in period wigs. On Netflix right now he is Simone, a Roman who wants a child with a partner who never did, in Daniele Luchetti’s comedy You, Me, Us.

That range is the first thing to understand about him, and the second is that he has never seemed comfortable with what it earned him. Germano grew up in Rome in a family from Duronia, a village in Molise, and wanted to draw comics. When a school of graphic arts turned him down, he tried acting instead. He had already sung, as a small boy, in a television advert for Bauli Christmas cakes, and he was twelve when he carried a feature for the first time, the family comedy Ci hai rotto papà by the duo Castellano and Pipolo. In his teens, while studying at a science-oriented secondary school, he spent a year at the Teatro Azione drama school and co-founded Bestierare, a rap group whose lyrics are about precarious work, prisons and fascist violence.

He was born on 25 September 1980, and the decision that set his path came at nineteen. In 1999 he walked away from a theatre tour with the director Giancarlo Cobelli to take a part in Carlo Vanzina’s film Il cielo in una stanza. The next six years were an apprenticeship in other people’s ensembles: Ettore Scola’s Concorrenza sleale, Emanuele Crialese’s Respiro, the television miniseries Paolo Borsellino, and the gang of Michele Placido’s Romanzo Criminale, where he played Sorcio, the most nervous member of a Roman crime crew.

The break came in 2007, and it came twice. At the Venice Film Festival, Paolo Franchi’s Nessuna qualità agli eroi caused a scandal with a full-frontal scene that Germano played without a double. Months later he won his first David di Donatello as best actor for Luchetti’s My Brother Is an Only Child, playing Accio, the restless younger son of a working-class family in Latina who joins the neo-fascists while his brother turns to the left. The film gave him a template he has returned to ever since: a character whose politics are a form of temperament, argued out in the body before they are argued in words.

Three years later Luchetti cast him again, as a widowed construction worker on the edge of Rome in La nostra vita. At Cannes in 2010 the jury chaired by Tim Burton split the best actor prize between him and Javier Bardem. No Italian had won it since Marcello Mastroianni in 1987. Germano used the stage to dedicate it to Italy and to the Italians who try to make the country better despite its ruling class, a reply, he said, to a government that accused artists of speaking ill of their own country. Asked about it two years later, he said he would say it again.

What followed was the most consistent run of any Italian actor of his generation. He played a gay man haunted by a theatre company of ghosts in Ferzan Özpetek’s Magnifica presenza and a journalist inside the police raid on the Diaz school during the 2001 Genoa G8 in Daniele Vicari’s Diaz – Don’t Clean Up This Blood. In Mario Martone’s Leopardi he bent his own posture into the poet’s, and won a third David. Giorgio Diritti’s Hidden Away pushed further: as Ligabue, the painter of tigers and leopards who was shuffled between Switzerland, Italy and its asylums, he gave a performance of stoops and silences, and the 2020 Berlinale gave him its Silver Bear for best actor. The same year he played Bruno Placido, the resentful father of a suburban family in the D’Innocenzo brothers’ Bad Tales.

The prizes tell a tidy story; the career is less tidy. Germano now has six David di Donatello awards, and the institutions that hand them out have come to depend on him for a certain kind of film: the state-backed portrait of a great Italian, made with RAI Cinema money. Leopardi, Ligabue, Berlinguer and now Galileo add up to a gallery, and a gallery can turn an actor into a monument before he is fifty. He does not behave like one. At the presentation of the 2025 David nominees at the Quirinale palace, he told Culture Minister Alessandro Giuli that the government should stop placing its own people in key cultural posts “the way the clans do”, and asked for dialogue with the film sector instead. The right-wing daily Libero later described him as increasingly isolated among his colleagues. That evening he won best actor anyway.

The prize that night was for Andrea Segre’s The Great Ambition, in which he plays Berlinguer through the years of the Communist Party’s attempt to share power with the Christian Democrats; it had already earned him the best actor award at the 2024 Rome Film Festival. Around it sit smaller, harder films. Michele Riondino’s Palazzina Laf, about workers punished with idleness at the Ilva steelworks in Taranto, brought him a fifth David, as best supporting actor, in 2024. In Sicilian Letters he played the fugitive Mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro, and he reunited with Luchetti for the psychological drama Confidenza. On stage he works with the composer Teho Teardo, most recently in a piece built from the writings of Gino Strada, the surgeon who founded the humanitarian group Emergency.

You, Me, Us, which premiered in the Grand Public section of the Rome Film Festival in October and arrived on Netflix on 29 October 2026, is his fifth film with Luchetti. He plays opposite Maria Chiara Giannetta, as a couple who disagree about children and try to adopt. Next comes Anne Paulicevich’s The Man Who Could Have Changed the World, in which he plays Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli, the anti-fascist archaeologist ordered to guide Hitler and Mussolini through the museums of Rome and Florence in 1938. Filming of Galileo runs until November in Tuscany and the Veneto, produced by Bibi Film with RAI Cinema and HBO Max, while Fandango sells it abroad. The producers describe it as an unconventional biopic, one that ends on a man forced to choose between faith and reason. For an actor who has spent two decades refusing to say only what is expected of him, it may be the most personal portrait in the gallery yet.