Sabrina Impacciatore has made international audiences laugh through The White Lotus and The Paper. Now, the Italian actress is heading somewhere considerably darker.
Impacciatore revealed in an interview with this reporter that she has finished shooting her first lead role in a thriller, a dramatic turn that takes her far from the eccentric, unpredictable Esmeralda Grand she plays in Peacock's The Paper.
"It's my first lead role in a thriller," Impacciatore said. "The role is very, very, very different from anything else I ever played."
The project is Un'altra madre, an upcoming Prime Video psychological thriller directed by Francesco Carrozzini and produced by Amazon MGM Studios in co-production with Lucky Red and Genesis.
Impacciatore stars as Olga, a therapist who leads an exclusive psychodrama retreat at an isolated country house for people dealing with profound trauma. Her son Lorenzo, played by Francesco Gheghi, accompanies her, but their already complicated relationship is disrupted by the arrival of Tommaso, a mysterious participant played by Alessandro Borghi who appears to know secrets capable of destabilizing the group. The film also stars Carlotta Gamba and Pierluigi Gigante.
The story delves into manipulation, guilt and the increasingly blurred boundary between treatment and madness, according to Prime Video. The film will eventually stream globally on the platform, although a release date has not yet been announced.
"It was very hard, but it was fantastic," she said of taking on the role.
The career turn is significant for an actress whose recent international breakthrough has largely been driven by comedy.
Impacciatore became widely known outside Italy after playing Valentina, the tightly wound hotel manager in the second season of HBO's The White Lotus. The performance earned her an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series.
She subsequently joined The Paper, Greg Daniels and Michael Koman's mockumentary comedy set in the same universe as The Office. She plays Esmeralda Grand, the flamboyant and frequently self-interested managing editor at the struggling Toledo Truth Teller.
Season 2 premiered Sept. 9 on Peacock, with all episodes now streaming. This time, Esmeralda is forced into unfamiliar territory as she struggles to find her place while her colleagues begin developing into more capable journalists.
Yet Impacciatore's move into a psychological thriller is not accidental. She has spoken about wanting to resist being confined to comedy and to move between radically different genres.
She is enjoying the extremes of going from "extreme comedy to extreme drama," acknowledging that actors strongly associated with comedy sometimes face difficulty convincing audiences and the industry to accept them in dramatic roles.
Un'altra madre could offer precisely that opportunity.
Italy for Movies describes the project as Impacciatore's first dramatic lead role. Her character, Olga, is highly skilled at helping other people confront their trauma but is hiding a major secret herself. Filming took place in Italy's Lazio region, including locations near Viterbo and Rome.
The transition also arrives as Impacciatore continues navigating another transformation in her career: acting extensively in English. Memorizing dialogue and dealing with pronunciation can sometimes create an obstacle while performing in a language that is not her own. But she has discovered that changing languages can also physically alter the way she approaches a character.
"When you change languages, everything changes," Impacciatore said. "The sound, the musicality, the body, everything changes."
What surprised her most was realizing that the emotions underneath the performance remained accessible.
"I was surprised that I can still express every feeling," she said. "I can cry, I can do [it] with another language. To me, this is like, 'Wow, really? I can do that?'"
That experimentation is also visible in the new season of The Paper, where Esmeralda experiences a crisis that exposes considerably more vulnerability than audiences saw from her previously.
Impacciatore said the character is confronted with how other people actually perceive her, forcing Esmeralda to question a self-image she had rarely examined.
For the actress, there was a personal parallel.
"Somehow the feelings that Esmeralda was experiencing are the same feelings that Sabrina is experiencing working in a foreign country," she said.
Now, Un'altra madre will take that reinvention in the opposite direction: back to Italy and back to her native language, but into dramatic territory international audiences have rarely seen her explore. And for Impacciatore, that appears to be exactly the point.
