Pietro Sermonti, the TV doctor who found his best role mocking TV stars

Pietro Sermonti

Photo: Niccolò Caranti / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	October 25, 1971 Rome, Italy
Occupation	Actor
Known for	I Can Quit Whenever I Want, I Can Quit Whenever I Want 2: Masterclass, I Can Quit Whenever I Want 3: Ad Honorem
Awards	Roma Fiction Fest

On the set of the cheap prime-time melodrama being shot inside Boris, the leading man is Stanis La Rochelle, a vain star convinced he belongs in Hollywood and loudly contemptuous of the way Italians act. Pietro Sermonti played him for four seasons and a film, and the joke carried a sting that his audience did not miss. Shortly before, Sermonti had been exactly that kind of star, the handsome doctor of a hit Rai family drama. He never really escaped the type. He turned it inside out, and almost everything good he has done since grows from that move. This autumn he is back on Netflix in the second season of Maschi veri, released abroad as Real Men, playing a husband who no longer knows what is expected of a man.

His father was Vittorio Sermonti, the writer and Dante scholar; his mother, the businesswoman Samaritana Rattazzi, is a daughter of Susanna Agnelli, of the Turin industrial family whose name has been tied to Juventus for about a century. Sermonti grew up in Rome, and the first thing he wanted was football. He came up through the Juventus youth teams until physical problems closed that door.

Rome, where he was born on October 25, 1971, also gave him his schooling, at the French Lycée Chateaubriand; afterwards he took acting workshops, some led by members of the Actors Studio, then trained in New York at the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute. The stage came first: Valerio Binasco’s production of Re cervo in 1995, then Luca Ronconi’s Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana. More decisive was a partnership with two young writers, Giacomo Ciarrapico and Mattia Torre, whose plays Tutto a posto and Piccole anime he led in the late 1990s. Ciarrapico’s 1998 film of Piccole anime was his screen debut.

Television made him famous in 2003. That year he was Beppo in Elisa di Rivombrosa and, above all, Guido Zanin, the doctor of the title in the third season of Un medico in famiglia, a ratings hit for Rai 1. He stayed for a fourth season and then, with the ratings still strong, declined the fifth. It is the first sign of a pattern: Sermonti tends to leave a comfortable role before it defines him, and he came back to the show only briefly, for its sixth season in 2009.

By then Boris had happened. Written by Ciarrapico, Torre and Luca Vendruscolo and first broadcast in 2007 on the satellite channel Fox, the series follows the crew of a cheap TV drama and mocks, scene by scene, the generalist fiction that Italian networks were turning out in the 2000s. Its satellite audience was small; word of mouth and, paradoxically, piracy made it a cult. Stanis was the show’s sharpest target, and Sermonti played him without a trace of protective irony, which is why he works. Roma Fiction Fest named him best actor in a sitcom in 2008. Boris – Il film followed in 2011, and a fourth season arrived on Disney+ in 2022. In between, Rai 1 cast him as Archie Goodwin in Nero Wolfe, opposite Francesco Pannofino, the René Ferretti of Boris: the satirists had been absorbed by the schedule they mocked.

Cinema arrived through ensembles. In Sydney Sibilia’s Smetto quando voglio (I Can Quit Whenever I Want), the 2014 comedy about precarious academics who start producing a legal drug, he played Andrea De Sanctis alongside Edoardo Leo, Valerio Aprea and Paolo Calabresi, the last two veterans of Boris, and kept the role in both 2017 sequels. On Rai 1 he spent three seasons, from 2015 to 2018, as Alessandro Ferraro in Tutto può succedere, the Italian version of NBC’s Parenthood, and in Phaim Bhuiyan’s Bangla he was Olmo, a role he kept for the 2022 series.

The cost of Stanis is that he was too precise. A performance that exact becomes a reading of the actor himself, and for much of the following decade Italian comedy hired Sermonti for variations on it: the good-looking man with a crack in him, the husband whose certainties are coming apart. He is seldom the centre of a film: one of a gang of academics, one of four friends, the son standing next to Christian De Sica. That can look like a ceiling, and in cinema it largely has been one: his film work has stayed overwhelmingly inside comedy. It can also look like a choice, made by an actor who walked out of a hit series at its peak and keeps returning to writers who use him as part of a team. Italian reviews of the second season of Maschi veri were mixed, and Cinefilos found the comedy losing some of its drive, even as it praised the friendship at its centre.

Streaming has been his most productive stage. In 2023 he played Sergio Locatelli opposite Lillo Petrolo in Sono Lillo on Prime Video, a series shortlisted among the comedies at that year’s Nastri d’Argento, and returned for its second season. In December 2023 he became Alfonso in Gigolò per caso, the son of Christian De Sica’s retired gigolo, with Stefania Sandrelli in the cast; the second season, subtitled La sex guru and pitting father and son against Sabrina Ferilli’s guru, arrived on Prime Video on January 2, 2026.

Maschi veri is the most revealing of these jobs. The Netflix adaptation of the Spanish hit Machos alfa, produced by Groenlandia, premiered in May 2025 and spent six weeks at the top of the platform’s most-watched series in Italy. Sermonti plays Luigi, a devoted family man in a failing marriage, beside Maurizio Lastrico, Matteo Martari and Francesco Montanari. The second season, directed by Matteo Oleotto and Milena Cocozza, premiered on October 7, 2026, and adds Carolina Crescentini, the Corinna of Boris, to the cast. Nearly twenty years on, the man who mocked the vanity of the leading man is playing men who have run out of it.

He keeps his private life largely out of view. The public parts are football and friendship: he is a declared Juventus supporter who has talked about the club on its own podcast, and in 2025 he appeared in Mattia Torre. La gentilezza del faro, the documentary about the co-writer of Boris, who died in 2019 and whose early plays gave him his first leading roles.

Next comes a family of a different kind. Un tranquillo funerale di famiglia, Massimiliano Bruno’s Italian remake of Frank Oz’s Death at a Funeral, opens in Italian cinemas on October 29, 2026, through 01 Distribution. Sermonti and Claudia Pandolfi play Riccardo and Daria, the grown children of the late Mancuso patriarch, opposite Diego Abatantuono, Stefania Sandrelli and Stefano Fresi. It is another ensemble and another man trying to keep his composure in public, a part Sermonti has been rehearsing since Stanis first lost his.