Maria Chiara Giannetta, the Blanca actress stepping out of Rai prime time

Maria Chiara Giannetta

Photo: Cinemio / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	May 20, 1992 Foggia, Italy
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Somebody to Love, Ricordi?, Welcome Back Mr. President
Awards	Nastro d'argento Grandi Serie · Telegatto · Ciak d'oro Serie TV

For most of Italy, Maria Chiara Giannetta comes in two uniforms. One belongs to Anna Olivieri, the carabinieri captain of Don Matteo. The other belongs to Blanca Ferrando, the blind consultant who walks into Genoa police cases with her ears doing the work of her eyes. Those parts made her one of the leading female faces of Rai prime-time drama, and she is now setting them down on purpose. In You, Me, Us, Daniele Luchetti’s new Netflix comedy, she plays Lucia, a woman who has never wanted children, opposite an Elio Germano who wants a family. For an actress the public met inside family television, it is a pointed choice.

The road to that choice started a long way from Rome. Giannetta grew up in Sant’Agata di Puglia, a hill town in the province of Foggia, where she was already performing in amateur shows as a child. Theatre workshops followed in her early teens, then training at the Teatro dei Limoni in Foggia, and at nineteen a place at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, the national film school in Rome. Before the camera there was the stage, including a touring production of the musical Chicago in which she played Hunyak, the inmate who pleads her innocence in Hungarian.

She was born in Foggia on 20 May 1992, and her screen career began the way most Italian television careers do, in small parts on long-running series. In 2014 she had a single-episode role in Don Matteo, Rai 1’s series about a crime-solving priest. Two years later came the miniseries Baciato dal sole, an episode of L’allieva and her film debut as Loretta in Marco Danieli’s La ragazza del mondo. Supporting roles in Un passo dal cielo and Che Dio ci aiuti kept her inside the Lux Vide stable that would shape her next decade.

The turn came in 2018. Don Matteo brought her back as Captain Anna Olivieri, commander of the carabinieri station in Spoleto and the first woman to hold the captain’s post in a series that had been on air since 2000. Olivieri was written as armour: rigid, disciplined, cool to the point of rudeness. Giannetta played the cracks underneath, and audiences followed the character through three seasons and into the handover in which Raoul Bova took over the parish from Terence Hill.

In 2021 she had already worked with Bova in Buongiorno, mamma! on Canale 5, as Anna, the eldest daughter of the family. The same year brought the audition that changed her standing. Blanca, adapted by Lux Vide from Patrizia Rinaldi’s novels, needed a lead who could carry Rai 1 as a young woman blind since childhood who works with the police in Genoa. She has said the broadcaster had to be persuaded to bet on her. The first episode drew about 5.7 million viewers and a 26 percent share.

Her preparation became part of the show’s story. Alone at home, she blindfolded herself to cook: a meal took three hours, an onion forty minutes. She built the character around losing visual focus and offering the ear where a sighted person would turn the eye, and she has said she found very few precedents, among them Audrey Hepburn in Wait Until Dark. In February 2022 Amadeus brought her to the Sanremo festival as co-host of the cover-song night, and she used her monologue to introduce the blind people who had coached her, calling them her guides. The role won her the Nastro d’Argento for best lead actress in a series that year and a Ciak d’Oro in 2024.

The awkward part of this success is the label stuck to it. In Italy, fiction is still a word said with a slight sneer, shorthand for Rai and Mediaset prime time and treated as the populist cousin of cinema. A Rolling Stone Italia profile published as Blanca launched opened by betting she would end up on festival red carpets, as if prime time were a waiting room. Her moves toward cinema have not settled that argument. Muori di lei, Stefano Sardo’s lockdown thriller opposite Riccardo Scamarcio, in which she played a doctor set on having a child, drew reviews that found the film uneven while singling out her performance. Hotel Costiera, the Prime Video series she made with Jesse Williams, was received as pleasant and predictable. In comedies such as Paolo Genovese’s FolleMente, where she plays one of the voices inside the heroine’s head, she worked inside an ensemble. The audience has never been her problem. The suspicion that an actress so closely tied to one channel can only be read through it has been.

This year she started answering it herself. In March, at the Bari International Film and TV Festival in her home region, she said that a fourth season of Blanca, if it is made, will be the last. “You have to say goodbye to the roles that give you so much, and as I say it I want to cry,” she told the audience. In May, Sky launched Rosa Elettrica, a six-episode thriller directed by Davide Marengo from Giampaolo Simi’s novel. She plays Rosa Valera, the youngest officer in a witness-protection unit, who goes on the run with the Camorra boy boss she is supposed to guard, played by Francesco Di Napoli. Reviewers credited the two leads with holding together a story that takes the risk of humanising a gangster.

Then came Netflix. You, Me, Us, titled Noi un po’ meglio in Italy, premiered out of competition at the Rome Film Festival on 18 October and began streaming on 29 October. It is Luchetti’s fifth film with Germano and his first for the platform. Simone wants a family; Lucia has never wanted to be a mother, and the couple’s attempt to adopt drags every disagreement between them into the open. Coming straight after Muori di lei, the casting has a quiet irony. Lucia is a character built on refusal, new territory for an actress first loved as the officer who keeps order in a small Umbrian town.

What comes next is darker. Giannetta is in the cast of La valanga, Elisa Amoruso’s Netflix film about the avalanche that buried the Hotel Rigopiano in Abruzzo in January 2017, shot this year with Andrea Lattanzi, Edoardo Pesce and Barbara Chichiarelli. Netflix has not announced a release date. Whether Blanca gets its farewell season is up to Rai and Lux Vide. Giannetta, for her part, has said that she loves to work a lot and that it also worries her, because an artist needs to stop and listen to herself.