The day after his mother died, 31-year-old Rocco Tano decided to get an impromptu circumcision. “I just wanted to feel the pain that my mother felt,” the protagonist of Netflix’s new Italian-language series Supersex explains in voiceover as he unbuttons his trousers and the surgeon’s scalpel nears his crotch. “I wanted the pain to keep me alive.”
Grief can make people do irrational things – but in Tano’s case, the snip to the foreskin was more than an extreme form of inscribing the memory of a loved one on his body. For the man better known as Rocco Siffredi or “the Italian stallion”, it was also potentially the death of his career. Because by the time it met with disinfected steel, Siffredi’s member was well on the way to being a powerful business asset. It was, as his distraught producer puts it in the biopic upon learning of the operation, “the greatest, most beautiful dick in the universe”.
Siffredi, it’s said, has done to pornography what Mike Tyson did to boxing or Mick Jagger did to rock’n’roll: redefined the rules of his trade. With more than 1,700 films under his frequently unbuckled belt – from 1986’s timidly titled Belle d’Amour to 2022’s more descriptive Rocco’s Perverted Secretaries 3 – he is the most prolific male performer of porn that Europe has ever seen.
The enormity of the tool with which Siffredi plied his trade undoubtedly contributed to his success: in interviews, he has put its length at somewhere between 23cm and 26cm (9in to 10.2in). But with Rocco, size wasn’t everything. Unlike the giants of US porn – John Holmes and Ron Jeremy – Siffredi was a looker even when fully clothed. With piercing eyes and tousled, sun-kissed hair, he stood apart from his peers in an industry that valued protagonists its male viewers could identify with but not be intimidated by.
Siffredi also had an emotional intelligence that made him a versatile actor. Over the course of his 40-year career, he has not only straddled bodies but genres, performing in lavish Italian period pornos shot in 35mm, low-end American “gonzo” video dirties and self-parodying comedies, such as the 2012 French box-office hit Porn in the Hood. Around the turn of the millennium, he starred in two arthouse films by auteur Catherine Breillat, 1999’s Romance and 2004’s Anatomy of Hell.
Supersex goes one step further. Created by Francesca Manieri, a scriptwriter known for her work on Penélope Cruz-starring L’Immensità and Luca Guadagnino’s We Are Who We Are, it explores whether Siffredi might not just be the thinking woman’s crostini but a feminist in his own right.
It’s a thesis that relies heavily on Siffredi’s Italian-ness (his intriguing stint in Margate in the late 80s is sadly skipped over). The series, which Siffredi says is based with “98%” accuracy on his real biography, takes its time to narrate his upbringing in Ortona, a coastal town in Abruzzo best known for heavy fighting between allied and axis forces in the second world war. To little Rocco (played as his younger self by Saul Nanni and by Alessandro Borghi as a grownup), Mamma is everything and Papa only a bit part. But he spurns her wish for him to become a priest, finding his origin story not in the pages of the Bible but in an erotic photo novel called Supersex.
Rocco is no mammone: he escapes his home town and follows his breakaway older half-brother Tomasso to Paris, where he discovers sex clubs and makes his first dirty movies. Actor Adriano Giannini, who plays Tomasso, is still best known outside Italy as Madonna’s sail-hand love interest in Guy Ritchie’s widely panned film Swept Away, which is an inspired casting choice: here, Tomasso is the Madonna-whore complex personified, unable to maintain a relationship with his sex worker girlfriend, Lucia (Jasmine Trinca), after she bears his child.
Rocco, unlike the older sibling he initially aspires to emulate, is shown to overcome that traditional and toxic mindset, which is why the circumcision scene is the show’s pivotal moment. When his idolised mother vanishes from his life, he does not take his revenge on other women, but on himself. “When women look at me, they see that I don’t judge them,” he says at one point. “I don’t punish them.”
But there’s a problem with presenting Rocco Siffredi as the man who feminised mainstream porn, and it’s all over the internet. To say that “rough” sex is a hallmark of Siffredi’s films is an understatement: spitting, slapping and choking are part of his standard repertoire. Supersex alludes to, but doesn’t fully show, an infamous video in which he takes a woman from behind while shoving her head down a toilet bowl.
“I often get described as a rough performer who uses violent sex,” Siffredi said at the Berlin film festival last month. “But this has never been a problem for me, because I always do the scenes in collaboration with my partners. We talk and we decide whether to do certain types of scenes. I didn’t wake up one morning and start to do rough sex: it’s been an evolution of what I learned from girls.” Supersex subscribes to its protagonist’s account: the first time Siffredi grasps a woman’s throat during sex, it’s because his partner tells him to.
“There are many women who enjoy rough sex – I enjoy rough sex,” says Paulita Pappel, a Spanish pornographic film-maker and intimacy coordinator based in Berlin. “So there’s a valuable truth in recognising that this type of pornography is something many women want. But there’s also a history of violence directed at women in pornography, and we can’t negate that.” She is sceptical about whether Siffredi could be described as a trailblazer for women in porn. “His films are very gonzo, very trendy, but I would not call them feminist.”
Supersex, which Netflix has made available for viewers aged 16 and above, cannot explore Siffredi’s complex character in as graphic detail as either his under-the-counter offerings or his arthouse films: the only closeup of Rocco’s rocket is in its bandaged, post-op state. Manieri offers the viewer a backstory and a trauma plot by way of explaining his contradictions, but you get the feeling that the stuff that really makes him interesting would have been right there in the sex.
The religious symbolism of the circumcision scene pales in comparison to the ending of Rocco, a 2016 documentary by French film-makers Thierry Demaizière and Alban Teurlai, in which Siffredi directs his own farewell-to-porn film and chooses to carry a giant wooden cross on his back through the hallways of the studio.
The Italian star, who retired from his business in 2004, then in 2015, and most recently in 2022, turns 60 this May. He is married to Hungarian-born actor Rosa Caracciolo, with whom he performed in pornographic parodies of The Bodyguard and Tarzan, and has two grownup sons. “My sex life is still very active, but it is no longer out of control,” he said in Berlin. For his birthday, he confided, his wife has organised a special trip to the Congo to see his favourite animal in the flesh. “My wife knows of my love for the gorillas.” In Siffredi’s case, truth really is stranger than fiction.
• Supersex is on Netflix now.
• This article was amended on 7 March 2024 to add Amira Casar’s name to the caption for the film Anatomy of Hell.
