Jasmine Trinca: the actress Nanni Moretti made, and keeps needing

Jasmine Trinca

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

Born	April 24, 1981 Rome, Italy
Occupation	Actress and Film Director
Known for	On My Skin, The Best of Youth, Romanzo Criminale
Awards	Un Certain Regard Best Actress, Cannes Film Festival · David di Donatello Best Actress · Nastro d'Argento Best Actress · Marcello Mastroianni Award, Venice Film Festival · Guglielmo Biraghi Prize, Best New Talent

There is a photograph from 2001 that Italian film critics like to invoke: Nanni Moretti, having just won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, beside a teenager who had auditioned for his film on a dare, had no acting experience, and was thinking seriously about a career in Mediterranean archaeology. The photograph captures the accident. What it cannot capture is that the same two people would still be making films together 25 years later — that she would have won Cannes and the David di Donatello by then, and that he would make her the lead of his most personally unguarded film while choosing, for the first time in a half-century career, not to cast himself.

Jasmine Trinca was born in Rome on April 24, 1981, and grew up steeped in a city where cinema and archaeology compete for the same ruins. Her formal ambitions ran toward antiquity rather than sets. When Nanni Moretti’s casting team came to her school while scouting for La stanza del figlio, she auditioned on impulse rather than intention — and was cast. The Guglielmo Biraghi prize for Best New Talent followed the film’s Palme d’Or. She was twenty.

What might have been a one-film accident became a discipline. Two years later she appeared in Marco Tullio Giordana’s six-hour saga La meglio gioventù — not the protagonist but the psychiatric patient Giorgia Esposti, a character whose fragility and opacity demanded more than first impressions could carry. A Nastro d’Argento arrived in 2004. Italian critics began naming her in conversations about a generation of performers who treated film as literature rather than spectacle.

The question that has followed Trinca through her career is whether her preference for difficult material — and her apparent indifference to the promotional machinery that converts Cannes wins into international stardom — constitutes artistic seriousness or a form of commercial self-sabotage. Outside of Italy and the festival circuit, she remains largely unrecognized despite a record that would make most industry peers envious. Part of the answer lies in her choices: she returned to Moretti for Il caimano in 2006 when other European doors were opening; she made Miele with Valeria Golino in 2013, a film about assisted dying that her country handled with particular unease; she took the lead in Sulla mia pelle in 2018, the reconstruction of Stefano Cucchi’s death in police custody — a Netflix production as morally uncomfortable as the case itself. These are not the choices of an actress building a brand.

The validation that the industry uses to establish hierarchies arrived at Cannes in 2017. Sergio Castellitto’s Fortunata — the story of a hairdresser fighting to reclaim custody of her daughter while her ex-husband and a predatory psychologist pull in opposite directions — gave Trinca a role that required the kind of physical and emotional specificity she had been accumulating quietly for sixteen years. The Un Certain Regard Best Actress prize was not a surprise to anyone who had been watching; the David di Donatello that followed in 2018 confirmed it on home ground.

In 2022 she turned her attention to directing. Marcel! — named for a dog, centering on a mother and daughter navigating a relationship that has grown too accustomed to each other — premiered at Cannes that May, two decades after her first appearance there as a teenager with no professional ambitions. The film drew comparisons to a silent-film aesthetic, delicate and rigorously composed. Critics who expected rawness got precision instead.

The middle years of this decade have confirmed a pace that Trinca sets for herself: lead of La Storia, the RAI adaptation of Elsa Morante’s novel about Second World War Rome, in 2024; a co-starring role in Illusione alongside Michele Riondino, Francesca Archibugi’s drama about sex trafficking which premiered at the Rome Film Festival in October 2025. In June 2024 she was invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, an acknowledgment that her career now carries weight beyond Italian borders.

Which returns to Moretti. Succederà questa notte — based loosely on stories by Israeli writer Eshkol Nevo, co-produced between Italy, France and Spain — had its world premiere in Venice’s main competition on September 5, 2026, competing for the Golden Lion. It is the first feature Moretti has directed without casting himself, something unprecedented in fifty years of filmmaking. In the role of Greta, Trinca carries the film’s emotional center. The archaeology student he found in a school hallway in 2001 now anchors his most open and formally curious late work — a detail worth noting for anyone who still thinks her career was accidental rather than chosen.

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Tags: actors, actresses, Italian cinema, Nanni Moretti, Jasmine Trinca, Sergio Castellitto, The Son’s Room

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