Benedetta Porcaroli
Fame arrived young and in the most exposed way available: Chiara Altieri in Baby, the Netflix series loosely drawn from a real Roman scandal involving teenage girls and a prostitution ring. A show like that flattens most careers into a type. Porcaroli's went the other way.
Italian cinema has used her for damage ever since, though rarely for the obvious version of it. In The Catholic School she plays Donatella Colasanti, a real young woman at the center of one of the most notorious crimes in modern Italian history, and the performance is careful with a story that could easily have been exploited. 18 Presents and The Hummingbird are family melodramas built around absence. Perfect Strangers, much earlier, is the mainstream Italian hit where she is the teenage daughter whose parents are busy ruining their own evening.
Then the range widened. Immaculate put her in an English-language horror film as Sister Gwen. The Leopard, Netflix's adaptation of Tomasi di Lampedusa, gave her Concetta, the daughter whose quiet disappointment is the novel's saddest thread. In 2025 she won the Orizzonti award for best actress at the Venice Film Festival for The Kidnapping of Arabella, which is a serious prize and, this early, a fairly loud statement of intent.
Movies (7)
TV (2)
Where to start with Benedetta Porcaroli
For real weight, go to The Catholic School, the most serious film here and the hardest to sit through. Go in knowing that it dramatizes an actual crime.
For the pleasure of watching her work, The Leopard is the best option, a lavish and unhurried adaptation where Concetta gets more interior life than readers of the novel might expect. Immaculate is the fun one, an efficient convent horror with Porcaroli in support rather than the lead.
Baby is the series that made her name and it is better made than its premise suggests. 18 Presents is the tearjerker, honestly done. Perfect Strangers is worth catching for the film itself, a dinner-party comedy that became one of Italy's biggest exports.