‘I want the audience to be seduced’: Joe Wright on his Mussolini biopic

In M: Son of the Century, Luca Marinelli’s Mussolini breaks the fourth wall to speak directly to the audience, inviting them to join his cause. Photograph: Andrea Pirrello

He built up violent paramilitary gangs and terrorised political opponents, suspended democracy in favour of a dictatorship that would inspire nazism, and plunged his country into a bloody war.

But a major new biographical series about the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini dares us to feel sympathy for the bull-necked creator of fascism, if only to demonstrate his diabolical charm.