Simona Tabasco
Simona Tabasco is an actor, born 1994.
Naples is where the career starts, and Italian television is where it stayed for a while. Tabasco worked upward through parts that got steadily larger: Alex Di Nardo in the Neapolitan police series I bastardi di Pizzofalcone, Gabriella in the political drama 1994, then Elisa Russo in the Rai 1 hospital series Doc, which has run since 2020 and is exactly the sort of national institution that makes a face familiar at home and invisible everywhere else. Earlier than any of it, she had a supporting role in the neo-noir film Perez.
The second season of The White Lotus changed the address. As Lucia Greco, a young Sicilian woman working the hotel's guests with a fixed cheerful smile and a very clear sense of the exchange rate between money and attention, she took an Emmy nomination out of a part that could easily have been written as decoration. What she does with it is refuse to let Lucia be either pitied or judged. The performance is all appetite and calculation, played light.
Immaculate followed, a convent horror film in which she plays Sister Mary and is by some distance the most alive presence on screen. It is early to say where this goes. The interesting question is whether Italian television can hold on to her now that the English-language work has started.
Movies (1)
TV (5)
Where to start with Simona Tabasco
Everyone arrives here through the second season of The White Lotus, and that is the correct door. Watch it for Lucia, who is running three performances at once, one for the tourists, one for her friend and one for herself, and notice how little the actress signals which is which at any given moment.
Then Immaculate for the English-language follow-up, a nasty little religious horror where she supplies the film's few genuinely warm minutes. Doc is the long-form Italian option, a comfortable hospital drama that lets you watch her across many hours instead of a handful of scenes, and I bastardi di Pizzofalcone is the grittier procedural set in the Naples she came out of. 1994 is the period curio, worth it if Italian political history appeals.