“At the age of twenty I tried to enter an acting school and at the end of the audition I heard someone from the darkness of the audience say to me ‘where are you going with that absurd voice!’. It’s as if I had been shot: I go home and I collapse into depression. Three days later they call me: I’m admitted to the school. I swear I never understood what happened.” The actor and director Marcello Cesena yesterday on Le Iene offered a monologue on resilience, telling some anecdotes from his career that began as catastrophes and then became the key to his success. The reason? The ability to turn aspects that seemed disadvantageous to her advantage.
“At the end of the second year – says Cesena – my teacher calls me, says that my voice doesn’t work in the theater, that I don’t function. Second shot. A week later, it’s him again, inexplicably he writes me into one of his shows”.
And here’s the turning point: “We debut, but my part is small and I immediately understand that on stage I am practically invisible – recalls the actor – So, since I play the role of a consumptive person, I decide that consumptive people are green and I start putting green make-up on my face apple with the usual absurd voice. Giorgio Albertazzi sees the show one evening and asks who the madman is who acts in makeup like Kermit the frog, he gives me an audition and chooses me to play the co-protagonist in Pirandello’s Henry IV, which is one of his greatest successes”.
Since then, “it’s always been like this: you’re too tall, you’re too thin, your voice is too absurd and then they’ll give me a role”, explains ‘Jean Claude’ from the comedy series ‘Sensuality at Court’. Which he concludes eloquently with advice: “If I really understood one thing about my job it is this: when they tell you that something is wrong with you, don’t be scared, it just means that they have noticed you“.
