Elisabetta Canalis and the Long Fight to Outgrow the Velina Label

Elisabetta Canalis

Photo: nicolas genin / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	September 12, 1978 Sassari, Italy
Occupation	Television presenter and actress
Known for	Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo, Natale a New York, Virgin Territory

The woman now holding the microphone on Tú sí que vales, Canale 5’s Saturday-night talent show, entered Italian television without a speaking part. Elisabetta Canalis was hired as a velina, the dancer who carries the news sheets to the anchors of Striscia la notizia and smiles for the camera, and the word has followed her into almost every job she has taken since. Maria De Filippi, who produces the show and sits on its jury, has now handed her the thing the label always withheld: the voice of the room.

Canalis grew up in Sassari, in the north of Sardinia, the daughter of Cesare, a radiologist, and Bruna, a literature teacher. After the classical lyceum Domenico Alberto Azuni she moved to Milan to read foreign languages at the Università Statale, sat a handful of exams and spent more energy on casting calls than on lectures. One audition, for a Leonardo Pieraccioni comedy, led nowhere. The one that worked put her on the most watched satirical show in the country.

Born in Sassari on 12 September 1978, she was barely twenty-one when Striscia la notizia chose her as its brunette velina that same month in 1999, paired with the blonde Maddalena Corvaglia. The duo lasted until June 2002 and became a brand of its own: a joint calendar for GQ, a team captaincy on Ciao Darwin, magazine covers that treated the two women as a single unit. Canalis has never disowned that apprenticeship. The format, though, was designed to make its dancers interchangeable, and it replaced them every few seasons.

She stayed. Through the 2000s she assembled a career from the pieces Mediaset offered: the valletta beside Sandro Piccinini on the football show Controcampo, a part in the police drama Carabinieri, the lead opposite Fabio De Luigi in the second season of the sitcom Love Bugs after Michelle Hunziker stepped away, a summer hosting Festivalbar in 2007. Cinema came in small doses. She was a lady in a castle in Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo and a nun in David Leland’s Virgin Territory, then a face in the Christmas comedies that fill Italian multiplexes every December, from Neri Parenti’s Natale a New York to A Natale mi sposo.

In the summer of 2009 she was photographed beside George Clooney on the red carpet in Venice, and her name crossed the Atlantic in a week. The two years that followed were the most visible of her life and, professionally, the most misleading. Hollywood gave her a recurring part in five episodes of the third season of TNT’s Leverage, credited simply as “The Italian”. ABC gave her a place in season 13 of Dancing with the Stars, partnered with Val Chmerkovskiy; she was the second contestant eliminated. The relationship ended in June 2011. Neither credit turned into a second career in the United States.

The harsher verdict came from home. Co-hosting the Sanremo festival in 2011 with Gianni Morandi and Belén Rodríguez should have been a coronation; instead much of the Italian press found both women stiff in the scripted sketches and short on presenting craft, and that reading stuck. Here lies the knot of her career. For a decade the public knew her mainly through the men beside her, first the striker Christian Vieri and then Clooney, and every new job was read as a reward for visibility rather than skill. Her own attempt to change the terms, the TV8 interview show Vite da copertina, launched in 2021 and was cancelled the following year for low ratings. The label was not only imposed. At times her results fed it.

Away from the studios she built a different life. She married the American orthopaedic surgeon Brian Perri in Alghero in September 2014, settled in Los Angeles and in 2015 gave birth to their daughter, Skyler Eva; that March UNICEF Italia had named her a Goodwill Ambassador. The couple announced their separation in 2023. By then Canalis had found the discipline that would redraw her public image. After years of training with the former world champion Angelo Valente she stepped into a real ring at the Reggia di Venaria, outside Turin, in June 2022 and won her kickboxing debut in a little over three minutes. A year later she beat Angelica Donati on points with DAZN’s cameras rolling, and the platform gave her Kick & Crumb, a series in which she meets fighters on their own ground.

The second act came through that door. In 2024 she returned to cinema for the first time in fourteen years, as Amalia in Gianluca Ansanelli’s family comedy Come far litigare mamma e papà. In November 2025 Rizzoli published Una zampa sul cuore, a book written as an imagined conversation with her dogs and led by Nello, a rescue she adopted from a shelter in Olbia with a fractured paw; the proceeds go to animal shelters. On 11 September 2026 Netflix released Physical Italia: da 100 a 1, the Italian edition of the Korean endurance format Physical: 100, with Canalis in a field that included Federica Pellegrini and Jury Chechi. A former velina in her late forties, measured only by what her body could do.

Three weeks later, on 3 October, she made her debut as host of Tú sí que vales alongside the fighter Alessio Sakara and the former rugby player Martín Castrogiovanni, taking over from Giulia Stabile, with De Filippi, Paolo Bonolis, Luciana Littizzetto and Rudy Zerbi at the judges’ desk. It is a job built on judging other people’s talent, given to someone who spent years having hers questioned in public. The season runs every Saturday night through the autumn, and its ratings will say more about her next move than the old label can. Canalis, who says she is single again and that her eleven-year-old daughter vets every suitor, has rarely looked less like someone waiting to be told who she is.

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Tags: actors, actresses, george clooney, Elisabetta Canalis, Italian television, Leverage

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