Berlin Shooting Star: Valentina Bellè on Acting as a Chance to “Abandon the Idea of Yourself for a While”

Manuela Santacatterina
·4 min read

Last Feb. 14, actress Valentina Bellè walked the red carpet at the Critics Choice Awards for The Good Mothers, the Disney+ series directed by Julian Jarrold and Elisa Amoruso that was nominated for best foreign series after bowing last year in Berlin, where it won the fest’s first Berlinale Series Award. And it is to Berlin that the 31-year-old Bellè will return this year, chosen as the Italian face of European Shooting Stars, an annual award given to up-and-coming talent.

“I am extremely honored,” Bellè says. “I can’t wait to meet my wonderful colleagues from all over Europe, all these incredible talents. And I can’t wait to be in Berlin to exchange ideas and experiences. And to find out where it all started for them.”

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Her beginning took place on the stage of her elementary school’s theater. “A confined space in which to abandon the idea of yourself for a while,” she recounts. “Up there, somehow, reality expands, and that’s what love for acting is for me to this day. It’s where I realized I wanted to do this for the rest of my life. I remember I even told my mom, but I didn’t pursue my idea. I was telling myself, ‘I’m going to get into it as soon as I finish high school.’ When I finished, I still felt that strong desire, but I didn’t quite understand if it was a young girl’s dream or something real.”

It turned out to be very real. In 2012, Bellè left Verona and flew to the other side of the world, to New York City, to study at the famed Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute. “As soon as I set foot in the academy I realized that dream was not just a hallucination,” she says. “It was an extraordinary experience.” She stayed there for five months before returning to Italy to attend the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, Italy’s most prestigious film school, which counts Italian filmmaking legends like Michelangelo Antonioni and Dino De Laurentiis as alumni.

“I wasn’t admitted initially — I ranked first of the ‘excluded’ group,” she recalls. “When I didn’t make the first cut, I didn’t really know what to do. I wanted to go to London to try to get into the Guildhall [the London-based music and drama school]. I had also been advised to get an agent. When I was offered a few roles, I went into a bit of a crisis because I wanted to finish my studies first. I asked my teachers for advice and they told me to take those opportunities, so I did. That’s how my story went, and at this point, I can only be happy it worked out.”

Bellè confides that, without a solid plan B, she would have pursued a career in teaching. “I always thought of teaching as one of the most beautiful jobs,” she says. “One of my teachers changed my life. I know they have that power to help young people discover they are capable of something, to dream, to help them blossom. Teaching is an extraordinary and very difficult job.”

Since her first small role, in Renato De Maria’s La Vita Oscena, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2014, Bellè has worked with a number of prominent international writers and directors in both film and TV, including Italian auteurs Paolo and Vittorio Taviani (Wondrous Boccaccio in 2015 and Rainbow: A Private Affair in 2017). On the first season of the Rai Fiction TV series Medici, she performed alongside Dustin Hoffman, with whom she worked again in the 2019 crime feature Into the Labyrinth. In 2023, she starred in two films presented in competition at the 80th Venice Film Festival: Michael Mann’s biopic Ferrari and Giorgio Diritti’s period drama Lubo.

Bellè recalls at least two breakthrough moments. The first was in 2018, on Fabrizio De André: Principe Libero, a TV film about the Italian singer-songwriter, and the second occurred last year on The Good Mothers. “Many years passed between these two,” she says, “and in [that time] I had many very important experiences, including acting in my own dialect, Venetian. In the TV series I Wanted to Be a Rock Star [in which Bellè plays a young woman struggling with the responsibilities of adulthood], I realized how crucial it is for an actor to have the opportunity to act in your own accent. It gives you access to a type of truth and a freedom onstage that you might never discover otherwise.”

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