Luca Zingaretti, the interview: his wife Luisa Ranieri, the series The king and the feminist mother

When Luca Zingaretti he pronounces the word family, his voice becomes full. He holds within him the privilege and pride of having had it and then being able to build it. For twenty years now, the actor has shared his life with Luisa Ranieri, whom he met in 2005 on the set of Kefalonia, married in 2012, together they have two daughters, Bianca, 8, and Emma, ​​12, named after her mother, because when it comes to roots you have to make sure they are planted well, especially when they are so deep. «It’s a refuge, a food, it’s protection but it’s not a shell, family is a bit like the place where everything begins and everything ends», says Zingaretti almost at the end of this interview, with the modesty of someone who would like to keep happiness to themselves . On the screen it’s a completely different story. Luca Zingaretti, 61, is about to return as Bruno Testori, the controversial and shadowy director of the San Michele prison, the absolute protagonist of the series The king, broadcast on Sky and available on NOW from 12 April. «We find my Bruno in a completely reversed situation», he explains, «We began to know him as an absolute monarch who governed inside his prison with often very questionable methods, and now he has remained stuck within his own plots».

In fact, the second season opens with his character behind his own bars. What did she feel?
«As an actor he had an unpleasant effect on me. I prepared a lot before shooting this series, I frequented prisons, I spoke with prisoners, with ex-prisoners who today work for NGOs and non-profit organisations, I took part in charity initiatives, but even if you go to prison just to shoot it’s still something that weighs on your soul. When you go in there, even just to play a charity match, you hear the door close with a dull noise behind you, the keys lock everything. We shot partly in the former Turin prison, which has now partly become a museum, and that place helped us a lot to enter a claustrophobic atmosphere because the operation of the series also starts precisely from this: exasperating some of the dynamics of human being inside a closed place where there is no way out. It’s a bit like the mechanism of many reality shows, amplified to the nth degree. In prison time slows down, in prison conflicts become more acute, but I have also discovered many episodes of great humanity that can happen between those who divide those walls.”

Director Bruno Testori maintains that “there can be no justice without violence and the truth is a luxury that we cannot afford.” Has your personal idea of ​​justice been affected?
«I don’t know if it has really changed, but you ask yourself two questions, also because what is seductive about Testori is precisely his attempt to apply a fairer justice, but if justice does not respond to some precise rules it becomes chaos. I’ll give you an example: in the first season, at a certain point Testori says “it’s not right that inside the San Michele there is a man who was sentenced to 20 years because he killed his terminally ill wife so as not to make her suffer and who next to he is there for those who have killed, dealt, done harm who will be released after three years. In my prison, for those who have to serve them, those three years will seem longer than the twenty years of the other.” It is an absolutely anarchic idea of ​​justice, but it cannot fail to exercise a certain seduction on all of us. The risk is to move the limit further and further, to push further. From an early age I learned that justice is one and that it must be objective.”

The situation inside prisons is increasingly difficult. Have you had the opportunity to reflect on this too?
«We should invest much more in our detention system because we are one of the European countries most sanctioned by various international bodies. Because our prisons are mostly inhumane both for those who live there as prisoners and for those who spend their time there as prison officers. Lately, the images of Ilaria Salis detained in chains in Hungary have rightly shocked us, but we cannot ignore certain debates which point out how the situation within our prisons is also burdensome and unsustainable. Cases of suicide in prison also increase every year. I repeat, a civilized country should invest in structures that are humane, which then allow ex-prisoners to be reintegrated into society, because otherwise prison simply becomes a punishment which then releases angrier, nastier, worse men. more determined to commit crimes than when they entered.”