Simona Tabasco, the actress Hollywood keeps casting as the sharpest Italian in the room

Simona Tabasco

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	April 5, 1994 Naples, Italy
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Immaculate, The Ties, I babysitter
Awards	Nastro d'Argento · SAG Award (shared)

Stanley Tucci needs someone who can get through the Louvre’s security systems, and the person he hires is Simona Tabasco. In Masterplan, the Prime Video heist comedy directed by Thomas Vincent, she plays Chiara, whom Amazon describes as “a sharp Italian cybercrime expert”. The job description fits a pattern. Outside Italy, Tabasco has become the Italian woman who has already worked out the angle: first the Sicilian hustler who leaves a luxury resort richer than the men who thought they were using her, now the hacker a veteran thief cannot do without. At home she spent years playing police officers and doctors who answer back. “They tend to give me tough-girl roles,” she once told Rolling Stone Italia. “Maybe that’s the impression I give, even though I don’t feel tough at all.”

The toughness, if it exists, was learned in Naples, where Tabasco grew up the daughter of an advertising graphic designer and an office worker, alongside a twin brother, Marco. Acting found her by accident. On a family holiday a director told her she should audition for film and television, and she pushed her parents to find her an agent. Two short films made for the Giffoni Film Festival came first, then a place at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome, the national film school.

The school did not hold her for long. In 2013 she was cast in the second season of Fuoriclasse, a Rai 1 drama set in a high school, as Aida Merlissi, a Muslim teenager. The shoot kept her away from classes, and the absences ended her time at the Centro Sperimentale. The set had become the training.

Cinema arrived the following year with Perez., Edoardo De Angelis’s Neapolitan neo-noir. She played Tea, the daughter of its protagonist, Demetrio Perez, played by Luca Zingaretti, and held her own against one of Italy’s most familiar television faces. The performance earned her the Premio Guglielmo Biraghi at the 2015 Nastri d’Argento, the award Italian film journalists reserve for young performers.

What followed was the long apprenticeship of Italian prime-time television, and Tabasco worked through it steadily. In È arrivata la felicità she was Nunzia, known as Nancy, a scatterbrained Neapolitan beautician, for 48 episodes. In I bastardi di Pizzofalcone, Carlo Carlei’s police series set in her own city, she played the officer Alex Di Nardo, a part she returned to over several seasons. She also led the comedy I babysitter. Then came Doc – Nelle tue mani, the Rai 1 hospital drama in which she played Elisa Russo, an internal-medicine resident whose love life the writers kept dismantling. She stayed for two seasons; when the third began, the character had moved to Ethiopia.

By then she had already gone somewhere else. In the second season of Mike White’s The White Lotus, set at a hotel in Taormina, Tabasco played Lucia Greco, a local sex worker who works the resort with her friend Mia, played by Beatrice Grannò. Lucia lies, flirts and, by the final episode, walks off €50,000 richer. CNN’s Brian Lowry wrote that the part “feels like a breakout role”. The cast won the Screen Actors Guild award for drama ensemble, and Tabasco received an Emmy nomination for supporting actress in a drama series. She has said the character frightened her at first. “I was scared because I had never played as sexy a character as Lucia before,” she told The Independent, crediting White for making sure she controlled what the camera saw in the sex scenes: “We had a kind of choreography.” What she took from it was simpler. “The most important thing for me in my career was to have arrived playing someone like that – a free woman.”

The international version of Tabasco is still a narrow one, and the narrowness is worth naming. Lucia is Sicilian; Tabasco is Neapolitan, and in the Italian dub of the series Lucia speaks with the voice of another actress, Ughetta d’Onorascenzo, so most Italian viewers met their compatriot’s breakout performance in somebody else’s voice. The Hollywood work that followed did not widen the frame much. In Michael Mohan’s Immaculate, a horror film led and produced by Sydney Sweeney and shot in Rome, she played Sister Mary, a supporting nun whose big scenes involve a broken leg and a burial alive. “I was so scared,” she said of being shut inside a three-sided coffin; she admitted she could not scream at all until she and Mohan went outside and screamed at the night sky together. The Emmy nomination got her into bigger productions without getting her bigger parts. She has been candid about the limit. In 2024 she said comedy in English was still out of reach: “It takes time to do it in another language, for you to be able to improvise, but hopefully one day I will.”

Masterplan is where that test arrives. A Gaumont and Amazon MGM Studios production, it is Prime Video’s first French-Italian original film, shot in English. Tucci plays Roger, a veteran thief who wants the Mona Lisa and recruits two young specialists for the job: Chiara and Jay, a French explosives expert played by Victor Belmondo, grandson of Jean-Paul Belmondo. Then he tells them they are brother and sister, and that he is their father. Vincent, whose television work includes Bodyguard and Versailles, wrote the screenplay with David Wolstencroft. Cameras started rolling between France and Italy in mid-October 2025, a few days before real thieves broke into the Louvre’s Galerie d’Apollon and took part of the French Crown Jewels. The film began streaming on Prime Video on 16 October 2026. For the first time abroad, Tabasco shares the top of the bill in a comedy, in the language she said she needed time to be funny in.

The rest of her public life has grown around the same image. Forbes put her on its 30 Under 30 Europe list in 2023, she modelled for Kim Kardashian‘s Skims, and she appeared in music videos for Ghemon, Tiromancino and Paola & Chiara. She has kept a foot in Naples, the city where she was born on 5 April 1994, lending her voice to a character called Lucia in Il segreto di Liberato, the 2024 film about the city’s anonymous musician Liberato. In 2024 she said she was going back and forth between Italy and the United States and was seriously considering the move. Her private life she keeps to herself.

Her next announced project is Cloud One, Goran Dukic’s adaptation of an Etgar Keret short story, in which she has been attached alongside Sophie Turner since 2024; it has no release date yet. Until then, Masterplan carries the question her career has been asking since Taormina. Chiara is one more sharp Italian woman, but this time the lines are jokes, delivered in English, beside one of the most precise comic actors working. If they land, the next script she receives may describe a character before it describes a nationality.

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Tags: actors, actresses, The White Lotus, Stanley Tucci, Italian cinema, Sydney Sweeney, Simona Tabasco, Immaculate, Masterplan

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