In the opening moments of Sky’s new, eight-part biopic Mussolini: Son of the Century, we hear the man himself speak. “For 20 years you adored me and feared me, as a god. Then you madly hated me, you desecrated my corpse,” intones Luca Marinelli, the actor playing the Italian fascist leader, over archive footage tracing the strongman’s rise and reign all the way to his execution by partisans in 1945. “Now, tell me, what was the point? Look around you… we’re still here.”
It’s an interesting moment in history to be broadcasting a seven-hour TV series about the ascent to power of the leader who, in inventing fascism in the 1920s, created a political ideology that would reverberate across that century – and beyond. Italy, where the series was shot, is led by its prime minister Giorgia Meloni, leader of the right-wing group Brothers of Italy, while across Europe, populist leaders are on the rise. Some of those figures and parties, notably, have been heralded by Elon Musk, the man last seen on the global stage offering what many saw as a fascist salute.
Yet for the makers of the drama, that meant resolutely avoiding crude depictions of the chest-puffing dictator and instead drilling into the psychology behind the terror, caricature and cataclysmic bloodshed. In other words, they were determined to show what made his bloody reign possible.
“We had to show all the violence in fascism – but also Mussolini’s great power of seduction on people,” says Antonio Scurati, from whose bestselling, fact-based 2018 book the series is adapted. “So, Mussolini had to be a very evil character, but at the same time, human and similar to us. Because if you [only] make evil out of Mussolini, or [make him] a funny guy, you don’t understand him. It’s both things. He speaks to our deep consciousness, to our fears, to our desires. And at the same time, he is a violent and fearful dictator.”
“We’re never going to convert a fascist away from their beliefs with this show,” adds the British director Joe Wright, whose film credits include Atonement and Darkest Hour. “But also, I didn’t want to just talk to the converted. I wanted to talk to people who hadn’t necessarily thought about these things or made up their mind. And that’s especially the case with a younger audience. Reaching out to them was vital to me. I didn’t want a dusty ‘oh, look, this is a history lesson about Mussolini…’ I didn’t want to patronise.”
The series introduces us to the firebrand and consummate rouser of rabbles known as Il Duce (The Leader) when he is 35, three years before he became Italy’s prime minister in 1922. He was an ideologue way ahead of Hitler in terms of establishing a brutal fascist agenda, before ultimately plunging his country into war alongside the Nazis. Yet Mussolini: Son of the Century doesn’t look like your average history lesson. It was partly filmed at Rome’s Cinecittà Studios, in front of the second-largest Volume screen in Europe, in a marathon 123-day shoot stretching across seven months. The production team, in a masterpiece of period production design, built entire 1920s cityscapes within five studios at this legendary hub of world cinema, as well as shooting at various locations around Italy.
When I visited the set in spring 2023, a scene involving the First World War hero and poet Gabriele D’Annunzio (played by Paolo Pierobon) was being shot against Volume’s giant LED wall, a filming innovation used to create a galaxy of alien planets on Disney’s various Star Wars spin-off series; on that day, the wall flickered with moving chinoiserie wallpaper. Cutting-edge digital technology is deployed elsewhere too, in scenes animating the walls of Mussolini’s boudoir. Adding to the purposefully asynchronous feel, and in another push for that younger audience, is a pulsing electronic score by Tom Rowlands, one half of The Chemical Brothers.
That music functions, in places, as the appropriately propulsive soundtrack to the story of a disruptive force attacking Italy’s precarious democratic system. “It’s intoxicating,” agrees Rowlands. “There’s a reason people will go smash up things and fight on the leadership of someone else. We’ve seen it very recently, someone’s words [giving] people the thrill of violence and destruction,” he adds, in a reference to the January 6 rioters who attacked Washington’s Capitol Building.
“The aesthetics are a kind of mash-up between Nineties rave culture and the film Man with a Movie Camera [an avant-garde Ukrainian documentary from 1929],” said Wright during my set visit. He’s a TV first-timer whose cinema credits also include his 2005 debut Pride & Prejudice (for which the Londoner won the Bafta for Most Promising Newcomer), Anna Karenina (2012) and his last film, Cyrano (2021). It’s [that] and every gangster movie you’ve ever seen. So, it’s quite full-on in that respect. And it’s quite kaleidoscopic.” No wonder it took him seven months to film it, then a year-plus in post-production. (So long, in fact, that another, subsequent Wright TV drama, Michael Fassbender-led CIA thriller The Agency, on which he directed the pilot and first episode, and is an executive producer, has already launched on Paramount+.)
The result accurately presents Mussolini as a murderous, tyranny-hungry maniac, with the scrambled aesthetic evoking something of the fascist’s mental spiral as he bloodily cements his position by eliminating his enemies to turn Italy into a fascist state within five years of taking power. But it also takes time and care to lay bare the man behind the throne-grab. To, in a risky play, humanise the inhuman. This is Mussolini – who started out as a journalist, editing his own populist newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia – as plotter and orator, propagandist and manipulator, back-stabber and front-stabber, serial cheat and charisma bomb.
Mussolini is about masculinity, specifically toxic masculinity, on a deeper, spiritual psychological level
“There are a lot of theatrical moments in the show, because Mussolini was also that,” says Marinelli, the 40-year-old leading man. Fourth-wall-breaking monologues, in which Marinelli-as-Mussolini talks directly to camera, create an even greater sense of uneasy intimacy between the audience and the man. “He was [described at the time as] an animale da palcoscenico – a stage animal. People that have a big presence on stage. To spend a year [on the character] really allowed me to go deeper and deeper in every detail.”
That depth began with physical transformation. Marinelli put on weight, shaved a receding hairline far into his pate and learnt to walk like Mussolini: the politician as a pugilistic performer, fists bunched on his hips, leading with his belly – or, indeed, groin. In a grimly violent, politically pointed drama that also dares to be bleakly, blackly funny in places, Marinelli’s strutting, rutting performance vividly embodies a complex figure driving a story that Scurati characterises as “grotesque and tragic and comic at the same time”.
For Wright, however, the resonances felt almost personal. “For me, Mussolini, is about masculinity, specifically toxic masculinity, on a deeper, spiritual psychological level,” the director says when we speak again, over Zoom, almost two years on from filming. “So, it required me to dig deep into the darker recesses of myself and look at my relationship with my own masculinity. That scared the living s*** out of me.”
He opted to film the series entirely in Italian. Yet did he have any concerns that, as a non-Italian, this was not his story to tell?
“No, because it’s a human story. Our similarities are greater than our differences. In fact, when we were initially thinking about the language, we discussed having Mussolini speaking in English when he’s talking directly to the camera. It was only the day that Meloni got into power [in 2022] – which also happened to be Luca’s birthday – and we were so shocked by that election result, that we decided that we wanted every Italian to understand every single word. So we decided to do the whole thing in Italian. That was really late in the day – we were in prep, and not far off shooting.”
Filming certainly couldn’t have taken place at a more febrile time. After his book, the first in a four-volume series, was published, Scurati says that he was “attacked by far-right newspapers with a very violent press campaign against me. That has had some consequences, even on the level of personal security. I was targeted by Meloni herself on Facebook as someone greedy, [who] only wanted to make money out of fascism.” That post, he says, came last year, after he was invited onto a chat show on state broadcaster Rai “to give a short monologue for 25 April”, which is the anniversary of liberation from the Nazis. “But my participation [in] the show was cancelled the day before I went there. [That was] censorship by the manager of Rai TV,” he claims of an appointee of the government: Rai is 99 per cent state-owned and the government appoints its management and board. “[That] was a huge [challenge] in Italy for freedom of speech. After that I became a public enemy.”
In his view, the controversy speaks to a persistent fascination with, if not lingering approval of, Mussolini in some political quarters. “The replacement of historical truth about fascism with a rewriting of history, which denies history, is part of the political programme of the far right in Italy and in Europe – let’s think about Germany,” he says, referring to the insurgent far-right party AfD, who have been accused of manipulating narratives around the Second World War.
And then, inevitably, there’s the sheer Trumpian quality of it all. Wright’s series opens with a Mussolini speech. “A time always comes when a lost populace turns to simple ideas,” he booms. “The cunning brutality of strongmen. In us they find an outlet for their resentment, an escape from their mortifying sense of impotence, a sudden miraculous hope of reversing their unsatisfactory destiny. It only takes the right words, the simple, direct words, the right gaze, the right tone.”
That, right there, echoing through the past 100 years, is the muscular appeal of the Maga call. And here is where this riveting series powerfully accomplishes its other job: as a warning from history.
“Absolutely. [That approach] was invented by Machiavelli, probably, but it was reinvented for the modern age by Trump,” says Wright. “And we’re seeing it play out now across the world. It’s why I took on this project. We use the word fascist liberally to describe any kind of authority figure. It felt like it was incumbent upon us now to really get to grips with that word and figure out what it means, and where the similarities lie between the current far-right governments and that world.”
At another point in the show, Mussolini the ruthless ideologue uses his newspaper editorship as a bully pulpit: “We demand, and what we demand we shout,” he says. “And what we demand, we pursue to the death, without the endless ifs and buts, the endless flaccid distinctions and babble of socialist theatre. This is how politics is done and this is how you make a newspaper. Headlines, catchphrases, straight to the readers’ guts.”
That, I suggest to Scurati, is entirely the Trump playbook.
“Yes, of course. But what is amazing is this monologue is Mussolini’s [actual] words. He is the archetype of every populist leader of the century to come. The past still lives on.”
“Mussolini began as a journalist,” he adds. “He did not have Twitter or X. But he brought into journalistic language a small revolution that is very similar to what happened when they started to do politics by tweet. That’s the beginning. The origin of our days is back then.”
It must, then, be bittersweet for him that this TV adaptation of his book is arriving at a time when it couldn’t be more alarmingly prescient.
“Yeah. But I must be honest: more bitter than sweet,” Scurati replies with a dry laugh. “I would prefer that my book and the TV series was less successful, and liberal democracy was not threatened. But it is what’s happened, no doubt.”
‘Mussolini: Son of the Century’ launches on Sky Atlantic and NOW on 4 February
