Lorenzo Zurzolo, the Roman actor Skolimowski and Los Javis both took to Cannes

Lorenzo Zurzolo

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

Born	March 21, 2000 Rome, Italy
Occupation	Actor
Known for	EO, La bola negra, Under the Riccione Sun
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 — Entertainment (2025)

Two films with Lorenzo Zurzolo in the cast have won prizes at the Cannes Film Festival, and neither of them is Italian. One follows a grey donkey across Europe under the eye of the Polish veteran Jerzy Skolimowski. The other, by the Spanish duo Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, known together as Los Javis, braids three gay lives across most of a century of Spanish history around an unfinished project by Federico García Lorca. In both he is a supporting figure who walks into someone else’s story for a handful of scenes and leaves a mark on it. That is the shape of his career right now: a Roman actor whom foreign auteurs keep calling, while at home much of the public still thinks of him as the boy from a Netflix teen drama.

The contrast is not a complaint. Zurzolo has used the reach of streaming to get into rooms with directors who would never have cast a teen idol on reputation alone, and he has done it without walking away from Italian television, where his recent work sits inside some of the most ambitious productions the country has made in a decade: Francesca Archibugi’s adaptation of Elsa Morante’s La Storia and Joe Wright’s series about the rise of Benito Mussolini. What has not yet arrived is the Italian film that puts him at the centre and keeps him there.

He was born in Rome on 21 March 2000 into a family that knew the business from the inside. His father, Federico Zurzolo, is a journalist at the public broadcaster RAI; his mother, Gabria Cipullo, runs an agency that organises events and productions. He has an older sister. Auditions started early. At seven he shot a Vodafone commercial with Francesco Totti, then the captain of AS Roma, a club Zurzolo still supports, and by eight he had small parts in the RAI series Amiche mie and in an episode of Don Matteo, the long-running clerical detective show that has served as a training ground for generations of Italian actors.

School was a liceo linguistico, with six months spent in England, and formal acting training came later at the Omnes Artes school in Rome. In between, the parts kept growing. Paolo Genovese gave him his first film role in Una famiglia perfetta in 2012, and television followed with Un passo dal cielo, Questo è il mio paese and Una pallottola nel cuore. In 2018 Christian Marazziti’s comedy Sconnessi earned him the Premio Leopoldo Trieste at the Reggio Calabria Filmfest.

The real turn came that same year with Baby, the third original series Netflix commissioned in Italy. Loosely inspired by the scandal of teenage girls from Rome’s wealthy Parioli district who were drawn into prostitution, it ran for three seasons between 2018 and 2020 and cast Zurzolo as Niccolò, one of the privileged students in its ensemble. The cast also included Benedetta Porcaroli as Chiara, and the two actors would keep crossing paths for years afterwards. The series travelled well beyond Italy, and with it came a different kind of offer. In 2020 Netflix put him in Sotto il sole di Riccione, a summer romance on the Adriatic coast in which he played Vincenzo, and that summer the Giffoni Film Festival gave him its Explosive Talent Award. He went back to the same character in the sequel, Sotto il sole di Amalfi, in 2022.

The film that changed how the industry looked at him was a smaller one. In Morrison, which Federico Zampaglione, the frontman of the band Tiromancino, adapted from the novel Dove tutto è a metà he wrote with Giacomo Gensini, Zurzolo played Lodo, a twenty-year-old singer whose band plays a club on the banks of the Tiber, opposite Giovanni Calcagno as a burnt-out rock star who becomes his mentor. The reviews were split, and Cineuropa found the story sliding into cliché, but the lead performance was not the problem. In 2021 it won him the Premio Kinéo for best actor during the Venice Film Festival, and the same year the Nastri d’Argento gave him their Persol award as character of the year.

Then came Skolimowski. EO, a Polish-Italian co-production, follows a circus donkey as it drifts through the cruelty and the occasional kindness of strangers, and Zurzolo arrives late in the film as Vito, a failed young priest who turns up at the Italian villa of his mother, a countess played by Isabelle Huppert, to ask her for money. The scene is brief, strange and charged, and it places him inside the work of a director whose first feature dates from the 1960s. EO won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2022, became Poland’s entry for the Academy Awards and was nominated for Best International Feature Film.

Television, meanwhile, gave him range. In Prisma, Ludovico Bessegato’s Prime Video series about adolescence and gender identity, he played Daniele across two seasons, from 2022 to 2024. In 2023 the Manetti brothers cast him as the young Diabolik in Diabolik – Chi sei?, the third film of their comic-book trilogy. Archibugi’s La Storia, broadcast by RAI in 2024, handed him one of the most troubled figures in Morante’s novel, the young Jewish anarchist Davide Segre, who first appears under the false name Carlo Vivaldi. And in Wright’s M – Il figlio del secolo, the Sky adaptation of Antonio Scurati’s novels about the birth of fascism, he played Italo Balbo, the leader of the Blackshirt squads in Ferrara and later Mussolini’s aviation chief, opposite Luca Marinelli’s Duce.

Here the story gets less tidy. The prizes attached to Zurzolo’s recent work have mostly gone to the films around him, not to roles he carries. EO belongs to its donkey and its director, M – Il figlio del secolo to Marinelli, and La Storia to Jasmine Trinca‘s Ida. When he has led a film aimed at a wide Italian audience, the results have been uneven. Squali, Daniele Barbiero’s first feature, released in October 2025 and loosely based on Giacomo Mazzariol’s novel Gli squali, cast him as Max, a nineteen-year-old from a small town in the Veneto who is pulled into a Rome start-up run by James Franco’s Robert Price. One critic placed it halfway between The Social Network and Wall Street; the reception was cool, and the MYmovies aggregate score settled at around two out of five. The Riccione films, for their part, were built for summer streaming, not for reputations. None of this points to a lack of talent. It points to the gap between the actor that auteurs want for a few memorable scenes and the leading man Italian producers have not yet worked out how to use.

The last two years have pushed the map wider still. Julian Schnabel cast him in In the Hand of Dante, his adaptation of Nick Tosches’ novel, which premiered out of competition at Venice in 2025: Zurzolo plays the younger Don Lecco, a character Franco Nero plays in old age, in an ensemble led by Oscar Isaac with Gal Gadot, Gerard Butler, John Malkovich and Al Pacino. In France he played Carmine in Camille Perton’s Les Arènes, a drama about the agents who circle teenage footballers, alongside Edgar Ramírez. The comedy Strike – Figli di un’era sbagliata, set in a rehabilitation centre, reached Italian cinemas in March 2026 after its premiere at the Torino Film Festival. In April 2025 Forbes named him to its 30 Under 30 Europe list in the entertainment category, on the same list as Porcaroli.

Then came La bola negra. Los Javis built it from an unfinished work by García Lorca, who was killed in 1936 before he could write the explicitly gay story he had in mind, and spread it across three eras: Granada in 1932, a Francoist military camp in Cantabria in 1937 and Madrid in 2017. Zurzolo, who plays Riccardo, joined a cast that includes the singer Guitarricadelafuente in his first acting role, Miguel Bernardeau, Lola Dueñas, Penélope Cruz and Glenn Close. At Cannes in May 2026 the film competed for the Palme d’Or and won Calvo and Ambrossi the Best Director prize, shared with Paweł Pawlikowski. It opened in Spanish cinemas in the autumn, Netflix picked it up for the United States, and Spain has chosen it as its submission for the international feature Oscar.

What is already shot points in the direction the career has been moving. 7 anniversari, Sabrina Iannucci’s first feature, filmed in Cuneo at the end of 2025, reunites him with Porcaroli as the leads of a romance built on an odd contract: a couple who agree from the start that their relationship will last exactly seven years. Marco Perego’s Petrichor, with Valeria Golino and Isabella Rossellini, is in post-production. At twenty-six, the boy from Baby has a filmography that runs from Skolimowski to Schnabel to Los Javis. The Italian film that makes him its centre is the role still missing.

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