Rocco Siffredi (Ortona, Italy, 59 years old) exhibits an absolute lack of modesty, an enormous self-confidence, which seems directly connected to his crotch, and also that tiredness that is usually drawn on the faces of those who have carried out hard jobs and exhausting. After all, in May he will turn 60 years old. “I thought they would never arrive, but here they are. I’m quiet. “My sexuality is still in order, but it is no longer out of control,” he said in February during a meeting with international journalists at the Berlinale, where it premiered. Supersex, the series inspired by his life that will arrive this Wednesday on Netflix. He will celebrate with a family trip to the Congo to visit his favorite animal, the gorilla (!), a gift from his wife, Rozsa Tassi, a porn actress and former Miss Hungary, with whom he has been with for 30 years. married.
The series is fiction, although “98%” is real, says Siffredi. “The remaining 2% was left out to protect my family.” It all begins in his hometown, Ortona, a small coastal town in Abruzzo known during World War II as “little Stalingrad”: it was razed because the famous Gustav Line that outlined the Nazi fortifications passed through it. Supersex tells how that carpenter’s son who was able to end up as a seminarian, as his mother wanted – described as a painful mother to which this grandmother, as they call mom’s boys in Italy, was especially attached—ended up triumphing in Paris, the porn olympus of the eighties, and later in the Hollywood industry. The title responds to the name of his favorite superhero, the protagonist of an erotic photo novel to which he was addicted during his youth: “I discovered her when I was 11 or 12 years old and I wanted to be like him. “I was born for this.”
It is considered that Siffredi changed this discipline forever. He was the master of porn gonzo and he normalized rough sex on screen, but he also psychologized his characters, who were no longer just phalluses with legs, which led Catherine Breillat to cast him as the protagonist of two of her films. “In her films she puts all her soul, it shows,” said the French director. Siffredi accepted right away, she said, to understand how it felt to be considered an actor. serious. “Supersex “It wants to reflect the cost of choosing this life, which is not so easy, although people keep the fun part,” responds Siffredi, who seems to carry with him the doubt of knowing what would have happened to him if his penis had measured a few centimeters smaller. long or wide. In reality, no one knows for sure his measurements. His owner has given, according to the interview, figures that range between 23 and 26 centimeters. Mystery, Buñuel said, is the key element in every work of art.
It’s a sign of the times: Netflix has had the audacity to sell the series as an almost feminist project. The creator of Supersex is a woman, Francesca Manieri, known until now as a screenwriter of The immensitywith Penélope Cruz, or from the series We Are Who We Areby Luca Guadagnino. “The mission was to inspect masculinity and observe the level of toxicity in the relationships between men and women, and the possibility of a new encounter between the two at this historical moment,” says Manieri, sitting next to her object of study and the actor who He is played by Alessandro Borghi, with whom he bears an unreasonable resemblance. Siffredi himself said in 2016 that the perfect candidate was Michael Fassbender (for more details, there is his film Shame).
“I have often been described as an actor who resorted to violent sex, but I have never had the feeling of abusing anyone. I have always worked with the collaboration of everyone”
The series is a deliberate crossing of neorealism soft —the miserable post-war Italy, the good-hearted prostitute, the violent brother—and the imaginary trash by Paolo Sorrentino, who strives, as Manieri indicates, to deconstruct Siffredi’s masculinity. Has the interested party also deconstructed himself? Does he have the feeling that he has mistreated women at some point? “I don’t think I treated them badly. Maybe I understand them better, but I have never had the feeling of doing something wrong,” he replies. “I have often been described as a performer violent, like an actor who resorted to violent sex. But that’s never been a problem: I’ve always done it with people who agreed. I have never had the feeling of abusing anyone. I have always worked in collaboration with others.” He considers that this will have been his main innovation in the pornographic genre: having conferred subjectivity on women. “The funny thing is that, in porn, women have become like men. In today’s porn, the strongest are women and not men,” he says.
When asked why he got into porn, he always answers that it was to have sex “with as many women as he could.” But there is a second factor. “I wanted to live my life as a free being,” she says. She would like that to be her legacy: that her corpus —attention to polysemy—was understood as a song to freedom, which he understands as synonymous with debauchery. “The world is becoming more and more strict. “We lose the freedom we had conquered,” he says. “And, at the same time, admirers from all over the world write to me, from Iran, from the Arab world, from Africa, who want to be porn stars. They pursue the freedom to be and do what makes you happy. That’s why I love my job.”
The actor has built a small empire in Budapest, where he lives with his wife and two children, and where he runs his production company and also the Siffredi Hard Academy, a kind of porn university that trains the stars of the future using extensive teachings. which provides a filmography of about 1,700 titles. Although he assures that he, unlike other actors, never revisits his work. “I have never masturbated to a movie of mine. It’s impossible, I can’t do it. I can watch the bits with dialogue and find them funny, but nothing more. It would be too much”. In the first chapters, Supersex He talks about the difficulties he had in combining love and sex; As a young woman, she used to see them as antagonistic things. Over the years, she has changed her mind. “Sex with love, with feelings, is the best. It is something insurmountable,” she says. “But I am also capable of doing it without love.” She refers to the facts.
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