Michele Morrone, the actor Italy found too handsome, is now a Maserati brother

Michele Morrone

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

Born	October 3, 1990 Bitonto, Apulia, Italy
Occupation	Actor
Known for	365 Days, The Housemaid, The Devil Wears Prada 2

Casting directors in Italy had a verdict on Michele Morrone, and he has repeated it in interviews with a mix of resentment and amusement: talented, maybe, but too good-looking to be believed. The face that kept him out of Italian drama rooms is the same face that made him one of the most searched actors in the world the week Netflix put 365 Days online. Everything he has done since reads as a long attempt to settle that argument, and his next film takes him back to the country that turned him away, playing one of the brothers who built Maserati.

His story starts in the south. Morrone arrived on 3 October 1990 in Bitonto, near Bari, the youngest of four children and the only boy, and his parents, Angela, a seamstress, and Natale, a construction worker, soon moved the family north to Melegnano, outside Milan, in search of steadier work. His father died in 2003, when Michele was 12. He has said the decision to act came a year earlier, while watching a Harry Potter film, and it survived a rough adolescence in which he was held back a year at secondary school. He trained at the Teatro Fraschini in Pavia and, in his early twenties, moved to Rome to wait tables between auditions.

The Italian years were small and steady. A part alongside Raoul Bova in the miniseries Come un delfino, single episodes of Che Dio ci aiuti, Squadra antimafia and Provaci ancora prof!, then a detour through prime-time entertainment: in 2016 he finished second on Ballando con le stelle, the Rai 1 dance contest, partnered with Ekaterina Vaganova. His first leading role came with Sirene, a Rai 1 fantasy series in which he played Ares, a merman, followed by the legal drama Il processo and the lead in Giulio Base’s Bar Giuseppe, as Luigi, a young addict, opposite Ivano Marescotti.

Off screen, the same period was coming apart. He had married the Lebanese stylist Rouba Saadeh in 2014 and they had two sons; the marriage ended, and Morrone has described the months that followed as a stretch of depression and empty pockets in which he took a job as a gardener in a small village in northern Italy and was ready to give up acting. Then his agent called about a Polish production.

That production was 365 Days, Barbara Białowąs and Tomasz Mandes’ adaptation of the first novel in Blanka Lipińska’s trilogy, with Morrone as Massimo Torricelli, a Sicilian mafia boss who holds a Warsaw woman, played by Anna-Maria Sieklucka, captive and gives her a year to fall in love with him. It opened in Polish cinemas in February 2020. When Netflix released it that June, it became something else entirely: it spent ten days as the most-watched film on the service in the United States and reached the top three in countries on several continents. Morrone has said he woke up with millions of new Instagram followers. He had signed for the whole trilogy, and two sequels followed on Netflix in 2022.

The audience and the reviews never met. The film holds a score of zero on Rotten Tomatoes, critics attacked it for dressing up kidnapping and sexual coercion as romance, and the singer Duffy wrote an open letter to Netflix’s chief executive, Reed Hastings, accusing it of glamorising sexual violence. Morrone was nominated for a Razzie as worst actor. The uncomfortable part of his story sits here. The industry at home had dismissed him as a face; the role that rescued him asked for little beyond that face and a hard stare, and it rewarded him with a global following that treated him as a fantasy before it treated him as a performer. His line about his own country, “Italy didn’t want me, I took the whole world,” is accurate as far as it goes. The world he took wanted, at first, exactly what Italy had seen in him.

He spent the attention in several directions. His debut album, Dark Room, came out in February 2020 with songs from the film’s soundtrack, including “Feel It”, and reached second place on the Polish album chart. He says he taught himself guitar at 25 from YouTube videos, and his channel there has passed two million subscribers. A second album, Double, followed in 2023. He also launched a beachwear label, AurumRoma, and fronted campaigns for Dolce & Gabbana.

The more revealing shift has come in English. In Subservience, S.K. Dale’s thriller about a domestic android, he played Nick, the husband who brings the machine home, opposite Megan Fox. Paul Feig then cast him twice: as Dante Versano, the Italian groom from a mafia-connected family whom Blake Lively‘s character marries on Capri in Another Simple Favor, and as Enzo, the watchful Italian landscaper in The Housemaid, with Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried. That second film became a genuine hit, grossing about $400 million worldwide on a $35 million budget, and it gave him a supporting part audiences remembered for the tension he brought to it. His own biography supplies the irony: the man who once took a gardening job to get by found his best Hollywood role playing one.

This September Netflix released the second season of The Gentlemen, Guy Ritchie‘s crime series, which moves Eddie and Susie’s operation to the villas of Lake Maggiore. Morrone plays Francesco “Cico” Maldini, the local fixer they rely on and should not trust. On 15 October, Maserati: The Brothers, Robert Moresco’s film about the family behind the car marque, opens in a limited release in Italian cinemas, with Morrone as Alfieri Maserati alongside Anthony Hopkins, Andy García, Jessica Alba and Al Pacino. A lead role in a story about Italian engineering, released first at home, is the closest he has come to the recognition the Italian industry once withheld.

More is already on the calendar. Lionsgate has dated The Housemaid’s Secret, in which he returns as Enzo with Feig directing again, for 17 December 2027. Still to come are Blame It on Rome, a Prime Video romantic comedy in which he plays a private investigator opposite Gabrielle Union, and the Italian superhero film Bunny-Man. He turns 36 on 3 October with more work lined up than at any point in his career, and with a Maserati biopic about to test whether Italian audiences will finally watch him as an actor.

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Tags: actors, Sydney Sweeney, The Gentlemen, Michele Morrone, Paul Feig, The Housemaid

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