Pierfrancesco Favino makes care look like work: moving a piano, keeping watch, taking time to teach. We value the patience of his supporting performances, even when they cannot supply everything the film around them lacks.
Fi1m perspective
In Maria (2024), Pierfrancesco Favino moves a piano, hides pills and keeps watch over Callas. As Ferruccio, he does these jobs with the patience of someone who has long since learnt that they will need doing again. Alongside Alba Rohrwacher’s Bruna, whose meals go uneaten, he makes the household feel inhabited rather than arranged for inspection. Pablo Larraín’s film is cold despite Edward Lachman’s handsome lighting, and we would not recommend it without reservations. Favino gives us a reason to persist: those ordinary duties carry more feeling than the scenes with Onassis.
The larger career has often demanded more visible changes of voice, posture and appearance. El Alamein: The Line of Fire (2002) helped establish him, and Romanzo Criminale (2005) brought a leading role. From the mid-2000s, international productions ran alongside the Italian work, with Ron Howard’s Rush (2013) giving him the part of Clay Regazzoni. Major roles in Suburra (2015) and The Traitor (2019) continued the Italian work. In the latter, Marco Bellocchio cast him as Tommaso Buscetta, a leading role central to his reputation for playing real people.
The Count of Monte Cristo (2024) makes fine use of that patience: his Abbé Faria is a teacher before he is a conspirator. Stéphane Taillasson’s damp stone prison and Bolduc’s dark photography leave little to distract from one man hearing another. We were moved when Faria’s voice came through the wall, because Pierre Niney made the simple act of being spoken to seem almost unfamiliar. The film gives their scenes a quiet it rarely allows elsewhere.
We recommend Rush with fewer reservations than Maria, although its central rivalry belongs to Chris Hemsworth and Daniel Brühl. Favino need not be the centre of a film to matter, but he cannot make Larraín’s film less remote whenever he leaves it. For a clearer sense of what he contributes, choose The Count of Monte Cristo, accepting its thin villains and increasingly busy schemes.
Biography
Pierfrancesco Favino is an Italian actor born on 24 August 1969 in Rome. He trained at the Accademia Nazionale d'Arte Drammatica Silvio D'Amico and began his career on stage before moving into television and film in the 1990s.
Favino has appeared in more than forty European films and television series. His breakthrough came with El Alamein: The Line of Fire (2002). He is known for roles in Romanzo Criminale (2005), The Unknown Woman (2006), Suburra (2015), The Traitor (2019) as Tommaso Buscetta, and international films including Night at the Museum (2006), Angels & Demons (2009), World War Z (2013) and Rush (2013). In 2024 he played Ferruccio in Maria and Abbé Faria in The Count of Monte Cristo.
He has received three David di Donatello awards, five Nastri d'Argento, two Globi d'Oro, three Ciak d'Oro and a Volpi Cup for Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival for Padrenostro (2020).
