Saul Nanni, The Leopard’s Tancredi, Keeps Playing Against His Own Face

Saul Nanni

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

Born	February 4, 1999 Bologna, Italy
Occupation	Actor
Known for	My Brother Chases Dinosaurs, Under the Riccione Sun, A Boss in the Living Room
Awards	Globo d'oro · Mar del Plata International Film Festival (shared)

Italian television and streaming keep finding new uses for Saul Nanni’s face. Disney Channel made it a teenage poster; Netflix handed it Tancredi Falconeri in The Leopard, the part Alain Delon played for Luchino Visconti. The roles that have actually won him prizes pull the other way. In Kim Rossi Stuart’s Brado he is a son who wants nothing from his father, and in Nicolangelo Gelormini’s La gioia he is a student who sells himself so his mother can make rent. The question his career now asks is which of those two actors Italian screens intend to keep.

Nanni grew up in San Lazzaro di Savena, on the edge of Bologna, the city where he was born. He is the eldest of three children of two doctors, a cardiologist father and an endocrinologist mother, and his first name comes from Saul of Tarsus, the persecutor who became Saint Paul. A name about conversion turned out to suit him. He went to school at the Liceo Galvani and the Istituto Sant’Alberto Magno, spent a year at a high school in Los Angeles, and later moved to Milan for university.

The way in was close to an accident, and it came early for a boy born on 4 February 1999. A boy who idolised the footballer Kaká, he auditioned for a Ringo biscuit commercial alongside him and did not get it. A casting agent who had seen him called instead about a period miniseries, La Certosa di Parma, directed by Cinzia TH Torrini in 2012. Extra work followed, then a small part in Luca Miniero’s comedy Un boss in salotto next to Paola Cortellesi and Rocco Papaleo.

Alex & Co., Disney Channel’s Italian-made teen series, gave him his first real role as Christian and an audience of teenagers across Europe. The show came with two soundtrack albums and a spin-off feature, Come diventare grandi nonostante i genitori, with Matthew Modine and Margherita Buy. Nanni walked away partway through the third season to spend a semester in Los Angeles. Rai cast him as Romeo in Non dirlo al mio capo opposite Lino Guanciale and Vanessa Incontrada, L’Uomo Vogue put him on its cover, and the modelling agency Why Not booked him for Giorgio Armani’s Acqua di Giò campaign.

He counts Pupi Avati’s television film Il fulgore di Dony, his first lead, as the moment the work got serious. The years after it were busy and uneven. He was Flavio, a gay model with a drug habit, in the Prime Video series Made in Italy; Marco in Netflix’s beach comedy Under the Riccione Sun, written by Enrico Vanzina in the spirit of his own 1980s summer films; and Alessandro, the love interest, in the Netflix romance Love & Gelato.

Brado broke the pattern. Rossi Stuart directed it and played the father, a man whose accident forces his estranged son back to the family horse farm, where the two of them have to train an unmanageable horse for a cross-country race. The film reached Italian cinemas in October 2022 without a major festival behind it, and Rolling Stone Italia later counted it among the most honest Italian films of the year. Nanni earned a Nastro d’argento nomination for supporting actor and won the Globo d’oro for best young actor from the foreign press in Italy in 2023.

Then the industry went back to the face. He played Rocco Siffredi at nineteen in an episode of Netflix’s Supersex, then Giulio, the young Palermitan who pulls an American visitor into one long night in Gabriele Muccino’s first thriller, Here Now, shot in English. Tancredi followed. Rolling Stone Italia traced a Delon line running through those parts, and France’s TF1 asked outright whether he was the new Alain Delon. It is a flattering comparison and a narrow one. Tancredi is the nephew who decides that everything must change so that everything can stay the same, a handsome young man who survives by siding with whoever is winning, and the six-part series was always going to be measured against Visconti’s film rather than judged on its own terms. Much of the attention it brought him was about something else entirely: Vanity Fair Italia’s interview ran under his line about falling in love with Deva Cassel, who played Angelica, during games of hide-and-seek on set. The couple, together since 2023, have been tabloid material ever since. From the model in Made in Italy to the prince’s nephew, the roles that come to him most easily keep asking him to be looked at.

La gioia asked for something else. Valeria Golino plays Gioia, a high school teacher who still lives with her parents, and Nanni plays Alessio, a pupil who prostitutes himself to help his mother, a supermarket cashier. The script comes from the stage play Se non sporca il mio pavimento and draws on the 2016 killing of Gloria Rosboch, a teacher in Castellamonte, by a former student. Gelormini’s film premiered in the Giornate degli Autori at the 2025 Venice festival, and in November it won Nanni a shared best actor prize at Mar del Plata, where Gelormini took best director. After its Italian release in February 2026 he was nominated for best actor at both the Nastri d’argento and the Globo d’oro, losing each time to Toni Servillo, who shared the Nastro with Valerio Mastandrea.

The past year has been crowded. Giuseppe Tornatore cast him as the young Brunello Cucinelli in Brunello: The Gracious Visionary, a documentary with staged sequences in which he was the only professional actor among the young cast; it premiered at Cinecittà in December 2025. He has a supporting role in Mat Whitecross’s MotoGP drama Idols, with Óscar Casas and Claudio Santamaria, released in Italy in March 2026, and Daniela De Francesco’s Dreamcatchers, with Filippo Scotti, is finished and waiting for a release date.

Next is Delitto sul Lago di Garda, a six-part Disney+ thriller adapted from Tom Hindle’s novel Murder on Lake Garda and directed by Laura Bispuri, which is shooting in Gargnano until early November and is expected in 2027. Nanni plays Leopoldo Vigevani, the wealthy bridegroom whose wedding sets the mystery going. It is another rich, good-looking young man. Whether he plays him the way he played Tancredi or the way he played Alessio will say a good deal about which Saul Nanni comes next.