Riccardo Scamarcio, the former teen idol who won Venice playing a father who wanted another son

Riccardo Scamarcio

Photo: nicolas genin from Paris, France / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	November 13, 1979 Trani, Apulia, Italy
Occupation	Actor and film producer
Known for	John Wick: Chapter 2, Polisse, Burnt
Awards	Orizzonti · Nastro d'Argento · Nastro d'Argento, Premio Guglielmo Biraghi · Globo d'oro · Premio Pasinetti, Venice Film Festival · Ciak d'oro · Premio Flaiano

On the closing night of the Venice Film Festival, Riccardo Scamarcio walked up to collect the Orizzonti award for best actor and dedicated it “to all the fathers in the world.” The part that won it was Dario, a man who devotes himself to a disabled son and slowly discovers, in his teenage nephew, the son he had wanted instead. It is a quiet, uncomfortable role in a first feature by an unknown director, and it earned the actor the most important prize of his career more than twenty years after Italy first put his face on bedroom walls.

That distance is the story of Scamarcio. He became famous as the leather-jacketed boy of a teen romance and could easily have stayed there, recycled into sequels and magazine covers. Instead he spent two decades working for Michele Placido, Costa-Gavras, Ferzan Özpetek, Paolo Sorrentino and Nanni Moretti, played Roman gangsters and a Camorra heir, became Caravaggio and Modigliani, and quietly built a production company that finances the kind of films a heartthrob is not supposed to care about. The Venice prize did not transform him. It confirmed what his directors had been betting on for years.

A restless boy from Apulia

Riccardo Dario Scamarcio was born on November 13, 1979, in Trani, on the Adriatic coast of Apulia. His mother, Irene Petrafesa, is a painter; his father, Emilio, worked as a sales representative in the food trade. The family lived in Andria, a few kilometres inland, and he stayed there until he was sixteen. School did not suit him. He moved from one institute to another and eventually left without finishing, a restlessness he has never tried to disguise in interviews.

Rome offered the only education he wanted. He enrolled at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, the national film school, and left it too before taking a diploma. The first jobs came from television: the Rai 2 series Compagni di scuola and the miniseries Ama il tuo nemico 2, both in 2001. In 2003 he appeared for a few minutes in Marco Tullio Giordana’s six-hour family saga La meglio gioventù (The Best of Youth), a small part in a film that would travel the world, and took roles in Ora o mai più and in Prova a volare, his first lead, which was shot that year but did not reach cinemas until 2007.

The heartthrob years

Everything changed with Tre metri sopra il cielo (Three Steps Over Heaven, 2004), Luca Lucini’s adaptation of Federico Moccia’s bestselling novel about a rich girl and a violent, motorcycle-riding boy from the wrong side of Rome. Scamarcio played Step, the boy, and a generation of Italian teenagers made him a pin-up almost overnight. The Globo d’oro, awarded by the foreign press in Italy, named him breakthrough actor of the year. Producers suddenly wanted him in everything, and the tabloids wanted him even more.

He used the attention to get into rooms that were more interesting. In 2005 he made Texas, the directing debut of playwright Fausto Paravidino, and on that set met Valeria Golino, who would become his partner for more than a decade and his most important artistic ally. The same year he joined Michele Placido’s Romanzo criminale, the sprawling crime epic about the Banda della Magliana, as a silent, enigmatic member of the gang. The Nastri d’argento, awarded by Italian film journalists, gave him their Guglielmo Biraghi prize for young talent in 2006 for Texas and L’uomo perfetto.

The pull of the romantic lead remained strong. In 2006 he starred in La freccia nera, a Canale 5 miniseries adapted from Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Black Arrow, opposite Martina Stella, and in 2007 he returned to Moccia’s universe with Ho voglia di te, the sequel to Tre metri sopra il cielo. But the film that mattered that year was Daniele Luchetti’s Mio fratello è figlio unico (My Brother Is an Only Child), in which he played the charismatic left-wing older brother to Elio Germano’s young fascist. It brought him his first David di Donatello nomination, for best supporting actor. In the same season he worked for Abel Ferrara in Go Go Tales and joined the ensemble of Giovanni Veronesi’s Manuale d’amore 2.

Choosing the directors

From 2008 onward the filmography reads like a deliberate education. Sergio Rubini cast him in the thriller Colpo d’occhio and later in L’uomo nero. Costa-Gavras gave him the lead in Verso l’Eden (Eden Is West, 2009), as an undocumented migrant drifting across Europe with nothing but his looks and his wits. Placido brought him back for Il grande sogno (2009), set among the students and police of 1968, and the performance won him the Premio Pasinetti at that year’s Venice festival. Renato De Maria, who would become a regular collaborator, directed him in the terrorism drama La prima linea.

In 2010 Ferzan Özpetek’s Mine vaganti (Loose Cannons) showed a lighter touch. Scamarcio played Tommaso, the younger son of a southern pasta-making family who comes home planning to announce that he is gay and is upstaged by his brother. The comedy was a hit in Italy and abroad, and it earned him the Ciak d’oro for best actor. The same year he founded the production company Buena Onda with Golino and producer Viola Prestieri, a decision that would shape the second half of his career.

The international offers multiplied. He joined the ensemble of Maïwenn’s Polisse (2011), winner of the Jury Prize at Cannes; appeared in Woody Allen’s To Rome with Love (2012); worked with Paul Haggis in Third Person and again with Abel Ferrara in Pasolini; and joined Bradley Cooper‘s kitchen brigade as Max in John Wells’s Burnt (2015). British television cast him in the BBC thrillers London Spy (2015) and The Woman in White (2018). In 2011 he also returned to the stage as Romeo in Valerio Binasco’s Romeo e Giulietta, a performance that won him the Premio Flaiano for theatre.

The producer behind the face

Buena Onda’s first feature was Miele (2013), Valeria Golino’s directing debut, about a young woman who secretly helps terminally ill patients to die. It premiered at Cannes in Un Certain Regard, and Scamarcio received a Nastro d’argento nomination as producer. The company went on to back Stefano Mordini’s Pericle il Nero (2016), in which Scamarcio also starred as a small-time enforcer for the Camorra, and Golino’s second film, Euforia (2018), where he played a flamboyant, successful entrepreneur caring for his dying brother. Euforia earned him a David di Donatello nomination for best actor, after a first one in that category for Sergio Castellitto’s Nessuno si salva da solo (2015), the story of a separated couple played opposite Jasmine Trinca.

Many critics still count Euforia among his best work, and the relationship behind it is unusual in Italian cinema. Scamarcio and Golino separated as a couple in 2018 and kept working together, a partnership built on trust in each other’s judgement more than on sentiment.

Villains, painters and Netflix

To audiences outside Italy, he remains Santino D’Antonio, the smooth, treacherous Camorra heir who calls in a blood debt from Keanu Reeves in John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017). It is a relatively small part, but it made his face recognisable to an international multiplex audience. A year later Paolo Sorrentino cast him as Sergio Morra, an ambitious Apulian businessman who recruits young women for a media tycoon’s parties, in Loro (2018). The role won him the Nastro d’argento for best supporting actor.

Streaming gave him a new kind of leverage. For Netflix he played the lead in Renato De Maria’s Lo spietato (The Ruthless, 2019), a gangster saga set in 1980s Milan, and then took on a triple role as star, producer and, for the first time, co-writer on Gli infedeli (2020) and L’ultimo paradiso (2021). In 2024 he returned to the platform with Svaniti nella notte (Vanished into the Night), opposite Annabelle Wallis, which entered Netflix’s global top 10 that July. On the big screen he joined Nanni Moretti’s ensemble in Tre piani (2021) and played Vitale Portfoglio, Hercule Poirot’s watchful bodyguard, in Kenneth Branagh‘s Agatha Christie mystery A Haunting in Venice (2023).

He also developed a taste for turbulent artists. In Michele Placido’s L’ombra di Caravaggio (2022) he played the painter himself, a brawler pursued by the Church’s investigators. Two years later Johnny Depp chose him to play Amedeo Modigliani in Modì, Three Days on the Wing of Madness, Depp’s second film as a director, which follows the painter through seventy-two chaotic hours in wartime Paris, with Al Pacino as the collector Maurice Gangnat and Stephen Graham as the dealer Léopold Zborowski. The film premiered at the San Sebastián festival in 2024.

That same year he brought a personal project to the screen. Race for Glory: Audi vs. Lancia, directed by Mordini and co-written by Scamarcio with Filippo Bologna, retells the 1983 World Rally Championship, when Lancia’s rear-wheel-drive 037 beat Audi’s four-wheel-drive Quattro. Scamarcio played Lancia’s team boss Cesare Fiorio, opposite Daniel Brühl as Audi’s Roland Gumpert, and produced the film with Jeremy Thomas. He closed 2024 with Simone Godano’s family drama Sei fratelli, which brought another Nastro d’argento nomination.

Venice, and the father

I figli della scimmia, the first feature by Tommaso Landucci, premiered in the Orizzonti section of the 83rd Venice Film Festival in September 2026. Scamarcio plays Dario, who dedicates every hour to his disabled son and forms an intense bond with his brother’s teenage boy, in whom he sees the son he might have had and the father he might have been. The projection eventually cracks Dario’s balance and drags the whole family with it. Critics singled out the sincerity of his work with the young Andrea Aggio, who makes his debut as the nephew, and the jury gave him the Orizzonti award for best actor. The film also won the section’s screenplay prize, for Landucci and Damiano Femfert. On stage Scamarcio shared the award with Aggio before dedicating it to fathers everywhere, including his own. The film reached Italian cinemas on September 17, 2026.

Private life

Scamarcio’s relationship with Golino lasted from 2006 to 2018. In 2020 he became a father himself when his daughter was born to his then partner, Angharad Wood, and he has since been linked to the actress Benedetta Porcaroli. He guards his private life closely and rarely discusses it. His attachment to Apulia is public, though: in August 2016 Polignano a Mare, the seaside town where he had lived for years, made him an honorary citizen. He dubs himself in the Italian versions of his international films, a small habit that says a lot about how much he cares about his voice. He once sang Zucchero’s Diavolo in me on the Sanremo stage with Francesco Sarcina in 2014, and has appeared in music videos for Negramaro and Le Vibrazioni.

At forty-six, Scamarcio finally holds the prize that tells the industry he is more than a reliable star. The young man who played Step became, over twenty years, the actor Italian auteurs trust with their most ambiguous men and the producer who pays for films nobody else would make. I figli della scimmia is now in Italian cinemas, carried by a Venice award for a performance built on doubt rather than charm, and the offers that follow a prize like that tend to be the difficult, interesting ones he has been chasing since he walked out of film school.