Lorenzo Zurzolo, the actor born inside Italian cinema who bet on Cannes to earn it

Lorenzo Zurzolo

Photo: Funweek.it / CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	March 21, 2000 Rome, Italy
Occupation	Actor
Known for	EO, Under the Riccione Sun, A Perfect Family
Awards	Nastro d'Argento Persol Prize, Character of the Year (2021) · Venice International Film Festival Premio Kinéo (2021) · Giffoni Film Festival Explosive Talent Award (2020) · Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe

In 2018, Lorenzo Zurzolo played a privileged Roman teenager on a Netflix series and watched it go international before he turned nineteen. Most actors in that position use the leverage to secure the obvious next thing — another streaming hit, a comfort genre, the path of least resistance through the industry. Zurzolo did something stranger. He went to Cannes for a film about a donkey.

EO, the 2022 film by 84-year-old Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski, won the Cannes Jury Prize and arrived at the Oscars on Italy’s behalf. Zurzolo plays a supporting role in it — human cast in a film where the animal protagonist does most of the philosophical heavy lifting. It is not the natural career move for a rising TV star whose streaming debut had just been discovered by audiences across Europe and Latin America. It is, instead, the move of someone who has decided that the biography of an actor worth reading looks different from the algorithm’s suggestion.

He was born on March 21, 2000, in Rome, to parents already inside the machinery of Italian cinema. His father, Federico Zurzolo, worked as a journalist at RAI; his mother, Gabria Cipullo, is a film producer. The access was real, the runway shorter than most, and Zurzolo appeared on Italian television for the first time before he was ten. By the time Baby premiered on Netflix in 2018, he had accumulated over a decade of professional credits — including stints on Don Matteo and Un passo dal cielo — the kind of work that barely registers internationally but teaches an actor how a set functions before the pressure turns serious.

Baby was the pressure turning serious. Based loosely on a real Roman scandal involving girls from elite high schools drawn into a criminal escort network, the series cast Zurzolo as Niccolò, a wealthy, conflicted teenager pulled between complicity and conscience. The role required emotional precision in scenes that could easily have collapsed into melodrama. Instead, the performance earned him a David di Donatello nomination for Best Supporting Actor and the kind of attention that defines what the algorithm decides you are next.

What he decided he was next turned out to be more considered. Morrison in 2021 — a character study of a young man at the edge of himself — brought him the Nastro d’Argento Persol Prize for Character of the Year and a Premio Kinéo at Venice. Then came EO, and after it a two-season Amazon Prime series, Prisma, about twin brothers navigating identity in contemporary Italy. Then La Storia, adapted from Elsa Morante’s postwar novel for RAI and Amazon — a production aimed at Italian literary audiences, not the international streaming algorithm. Then M. Il figlio del secolo, the Sky Atlantic adaptation of Antonio Scurati’s novels on the rise of Italian fascism, where Zurzolo played Italo Balbo alongside Luca Marinelli’s Mussolini.

The cumulative pattern of those choices reveals something. Zurzolo is working through the Italian literary and cultural canon — not as a checklist, but as a method. Each project addresses a specific chapter of Italian cultural memory or present-tense anxiety. The range is not accidental.

He says in interviews that Italian cinema receives more respect abroad than Italians give it at home. He makes this point without rhetorical inflation — as someone who has watched the same work receive different receptions depending on where you’re watching it from, who has been on sets running through RAI and through Netflix and through international festival circuits. The observation carries weight because it is specific, not aspirational.

The criticism that can be made of his trajectory — and it is worth making — is that the artistic seriousness has occasionally outpaced the mass-audience follow-through. Baby reached tens of millions of households across multiple continents. EO is the kind of film that wins prizes from exactly the people who matter to a director like Skolimowski. The two projects do not compete for the same audience, and navigating between those registers requires either a very clear hierarchy of priorities or a very long view of what a career is for. The answer Zurzolo gives through his choices — artistically serious, commercially patient — is a bet, not yet a verdict.

In 2025, he appeared in Squali alongside James Franco, and in the summer of 2026, began filming an untitled romantic thriller with Sydney Sweeney — a project large enough in scale and international visibility to place him back inside the attention economy he has been carefully not depending on. What he makes of that return, and whether the discipline of the last several years holds under higher commercial pressure, is the argument his career is now asking. He is twenty-six years old.