Gary Oldman Joins Cast of Paolo Sorrentino’s New Untitled Film, a Love Letter to His Native Naples

Gary Oldman has joined the cast of Paolo Sorrentino’s new film that is currently shooting in Naples.

Details about Oldman’s role in the still-untitled Italian-language drama are being kept under wraps.

More from Variety

• Luca Guadagnino, Paolo Sorrentino Stand Behind Italian Film Students After Right-Wing Government Attempts to Take Over Centro Sperimentale School

• Paolo Sorrentino's New Movie Heads Back to Naples, For Love Letter to His Native City (EXCLUSIVE)

• Sky Unveils Italian 'Call My Agent' Adaptation Featuring Paolo Sorrentino Pope Show Gag

Sorrentino’s 10th feature is about a woman named Partenope “who bears the name of her city but is neither siren nor myth,” as the auteur – who won an international Oscar in 2013 for “The Great Beauty” –put it in a statement to Variety in June, when the shoot started.

In Greek mythology, Parthenope, as she is known in English, is the name of a siren who having failed to entice Odysseus with her songs, cast herself into the sea and drowned. Her body washed up on a symbolic foundational rock where Naples lies. Neapolitans in Italy are also known as “Parthenopeans.”

“Her long life embodies the full repertoire of human existence: youth’s lightheartedness and its demise, classical beauty and its inexorable permutations, pointless and impossible loves, stale flirtations and dizzying passion, night-time kisses on Capri, flashes of joy and persistent suffering, real and invented fathers, endings and new beginnings,” Sorrentino added.

Also joining the cast are Italian actors Nello Mascia and Biagio Izzo.

The film’s previously announced main cast – with no indications provided of who plays what role – comprises Luisa Ranieri, who played the emotionally troubled aunt Patrizia in “The Hand of God”; Silvio Orlando, who played Cardinal Voiello in “The Young Pope”; Stefania Sandrelli, who was Bernardo Bertolucci’s muse and has starred in a slew of Italian films of various sorts; Isabella Ferrari (“The Great Beauty”); Peppe Lanzetta (“Spectre”); Alfonso Santagata (Matteo Garrone’s “Gomorrah”); Lorenzo Gleijeses (“Baby”); Silvia Degrandi (“Doc,” “Petra”); and newcomer Celeste Dalla Porta.

Sorrentino’s new film is being shot between Naples and Capri. It is an Italian-French co-production produced by Lorenzo Mieli for The Apartment Pictures, a Fremantle company; by Anthony Vaccarello for Saint Laurent; Paolo Sorrentino for Numero 10 and Ardavan Safaee for Pathé. Douglas Urbanski serves as executive producer.

The Italian auteur began his career with the Naples-set “L’uomo in Più” (“One Man Up”), a dual plot line drama in which Toni Servillo plays an aging crooner. Servillo then became the helmer’s male muse, also starring in “The Consequences of Love” (2004), “Il Divo” (2008) and Sorrentino’s 2013 international Oscar-winner “The Great Beauty,” a love letter to Rome in which Servillo plays a novelist-journalist with writers’ block on a Dantesque descent amid the Eternal City’s grotesque glitterati and the country’s malaise and cultural impasse.

Following Sorrentino’s foray into TV with Sky and HBO’s “The Young Pope” and “The New Pope,” which made an international splash, the prolific director was on the verge of making his first Hollywood movie, but the pandemic got in the way. He returned to Naples for “The Hand of God,” a Netflix film released in November 2021 that won two prizes at Venice, bolstering Sorrentino’s status as Italy’s most bankable director.

His new film, to put it simply, appears to be a love letter to Naples with a female protagonist.

Sales will be handled by UTA and Fremantle.

Oldman is repped by IAG, Douglas Management Group and Paul Hastings LLP

Best of Variety

• 'Game of Thrones' Filming Locations in Northern Ireland to Open as Tourist Attractions

Sign up for Variety’s Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Click here to read the full article.