Joe Wright wishes his Mussolini show wasn't so timely

With his new limited series, the Pride & Prejudice director reminds us that "it's not just America that's facing these questions right now."

By Danette Chavez | September 12, 2025 | 1:00pm

Luca Marinelli as Benito Mussolini (Photo: Andrea Pirrello)

TV Features Joe Wright

Joe Wright wishes his Mussolini show wasn't so timely

A dangerous demagogue swept into power by an ill-informed populace. Military forces turned on civilian populations. Intimidation at the polls. A fourth estate annexed by the government. These developments could describe the United States in the 2020s, but they’re pivotal events in Joe Wright’s Mussolini: Son Of The Century, a stylish and riveting limited series based on the first book in Antonio Scurati’s series about the founder of fascism, Benito Mussolini. The show, which premiered on September 10 in the U.S. on MUBI after debuting on Sky Atlantic, charts the Italian dictator’s rise to power, starting with his ouster from the Italian Socialist Party, his embrace of Italian nationalism, and his use of secret police.

Grim as that history may be, Wright’s eight-parter, like the book it draws from, is anything but. Along with his co-writers Stefano Bises, Davide Sevino, and Scurati, the Pride & Prejudice and Darkest Hour director crafts a fascinating amalgam of fact and fancy to capture how a tyrant like Mussolini could capture the imagination of the Italian citizenry after the first World War. That was part of Wright’s mission to better understand the roots of fascism, which have stretched into the present. Although there’s the occasional nod to Mussolini’s modern-day analogs, like a call to “make Italy great again,” Wright and his collaborators let audiences draw their own parallels—a task that is being made easier, at least for many U.S. viewers, in the Trump presidency.

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Aside from just not being his style, Wright tells The A.V. Club he knew he couldn’t put forth a straightforward history lesson or a bleak drama. That wouldn’t deepen anyone’s understanding of how someone as alternately loathsome and pathetic as Mussolini became entrenched in politics. It was equally important to the filmmaker that the dictator not be depicted as a one-dimensional monster. That would elide how he came to rule and the “shared responsibility” of those who swept him into power. Instead, Mussolini: Son Of The Century keenly—sometimes hilariously and always with great elan—observes everything that went wrong and right to create a path for fascism to find its way to the highest levels of government.

The A.V. Club talked to Wright about the series, the “centrist” U.S. entertainment industry that made its Stateside arrival look unlikely, and the incidental topicality of his recent work.

The A.V. Club: Antonio Scurati described his book as a documentary novel because of all the historical records and documents he incorporated. What term would you use to describe your series: historical drama or…?

Joe Wright: I guess I would call it a historical political horror, maybe. [Laughs] But I tried to find the cinematic equivalent of Scurati’s form, and so the show involves lots of different media, from newspapers to drama to first person narration, to try and create that kaleidoscopic view on this subject.

AVC: As far as the narration, there’s obviously a bit of that in the book. Did that inspire Luca Marinelli’s talk-to-camera moments as Mussolini in the show?

JW: Yeah. There was a little piece at the beginning of the book where Mussolini talks in first person. And we felt that using this first person allowed access to a contemporary audience and thematically was interesting because it suggests him trying to take control of his own narrative. As the show progresses, he more and more loses control of that narrative.

AVC: In trying to land on the right approach for the adaptation, you said you drew from lots of sources of inspiration, citing films like Dziga Vertov’s Man With A Movie Camera and Howard Hawks’ Scarface as well as ’90s rave culture as influences. What other references can people expect to see in your show? I thought I caught a nod to My Fair Lady in a scene from one of the early episodes.

JW: [Do you mean] the horse race?

AVC: Yes.

JW: Absolutely. I really had to dig quite deep on this. It is eight hours long, and that’s a lot of screen time to keep it engaging and to keep up that collage effect. I was pulling references from all over the place. There’s even sequences of puppet theater in the show. I guess one of the big influences was a movie called The Damned by [Luchino] Visconti and especially the sequence that depicts the Night Of The Long Knives. That’s a film about the moral corruption of the Nazi ideology, so that was a big influence. And Italian cinema in general—I’ve always been a huge fan. The opportunity to go and pretend that I was an Italian director, working amongst the ghosts of all those greats at Cinecittà Studios in Rome was extraordinary to me. I feel very privileged to have had that opportunity.

AVC: Can you talk a bit about the decision to make this a very Italian production? Because I think the temptation right now would be to have a bunch of American actors or other European actors attempting an accent. But there’s just something about listening to the dialogue in Italian and realizing how much of what’s happening onscreen translates.

JW: Yeah, it’s interesting. I don’t speak Italian, so I was working in a completely foreign language. Originally, we had discussed the idea that when Mussolini talks directly to camera, he would be speaking in English, and then the dialogue between the different characters would be in Italian. And then Giorgia Meloni’s party, the Brothers Of Italy, came to power whilst we were in pre-production, and at that point, I felt I wanted every single Italian to understand every single word of what was being said.

I’m not sure if it would’ve worked with actors from other cultures. If you have British actors, their heritage is all very text-based, and so they all stand there and talk. American actors are quite psychoanalysis-based—it’s all about the feelings—whereas the Italian actors are all very physical. They come from a heritage of commedia dell’arte. There’s something incredibly physical and vocally operatic about the way they use their voices, so they convey feeling in a much more extroverted way. I guess that certainly helped me and, I think, is helpful to the audience.

But I think it’s really exciting that we now see so many foreign language shows on our streaming platforms—Squid Game and My Brilliant Friend. I think audiences are more open to that experience now in a way that they probably weren’t 10 or 15 years ago.

AVC: Earlier this year, in an interview with Christiane Amanpour, you said your goal in making this show was to understand fascism, its etymology. What did you learn about it while making the show? And were you particularly surprised by anything?

JW: I’m always trying to look at the kind of human impulse behind the actions, and I guess what I discovered was that, for me, fascism is the politicization of toxic masculinity that expresses itself on a personal level in terms of relationship with the self, or in a domestic level with the family, or in a local level with friends, or finally on a national political level. It’s the same thing. It goes all the way through. I think at the center of fascism and, therefore, toxic masculinity, is a kind of void—a kind of emptiness and a need to fill that emptiness with something. But it’s never really for anything. It’s against lots of things, but it’s never really for anything. That’s one of the reasons why I think I’ve always felt it very difficult to define, to pin down what exactly it is.

AVC: You also described the entertainment industry in the U.S. specifically as becoming more apolitical and centrist. Did that make you concerned at all about finding a distributor for the show?

JW: Yeah, very much so. We’d finished the show, and it was financed out of Europe, and so we were looking for distribution. One of the major streamers told me that they liked the show very much, but that they found it too controversial, which really shocked me because I wasn’t aware that anti-fascism was controversial now. So that was surprising and alarming.

AVC: I’d like to ask you about what I see as kind of the other side of that coin. A lot of people today have this view, misguided or not, that depiction equals endorsement—that unless the bad person gets their comeuppance by the end of the runtime, their behavior is effectively being endorsed by the film or the show. What are your thoughts on that kind of approach to watching any kind of media?

JW: I think that underestimates the intelligence of our audience, frankly. I don’t think audiences are children who need to be fed simple solutions. And in fact, that’s one of the things that fascism does, is it just disregards the complexity of our shared experience and offers simple solutions that are indeed actually lies.

Unfortunately, bad people don’t always get their comeuppance. That’s something we learn as we develop out of childhood. I think that it’s important. I consider it important to try and understand these characters as humans and not to demonize them, because by demonizing them, we absolve ourselves of responsibility, whereas by humanizing them, we engage in the shared responsibility of these people’s actions and we can talk about where it comes from. As I mentioned, the whole idea about toxic masculinity: We can talk about why, what vulnerabilities, what fears feed this kind of behavior. And then we can take responsibility to try and change that.

AVC: I appreciate your insights because, without getting too into the weeds, there does seem to be an overlap between waning media literacy and cultural criticism and the role the media plays in political movements. Son Of The Century certainly explores how the power of the press can be used for good or ill.

Now, back in 2017, you told The Guardian you had always wanted to make a topical film, and you ended up getting one with Darkest Hour almost by accident. The timing seems to keep working out for you because Darkest Hour premiered at the start of the first Trump presidency and now Son Of The Century is coming out as we are seeing the chilling effects of the second one. Are you at all concerned that timeliness will put people off? Or do you think it’s an advantage for the show here, in terms of getting more eyes on it?

JW: Oh, god, I wish it wasn’t as timely. I wish that it was just of intellectual interest or historical interest and had no relation to our current world situation. And I think that’s really important to state. It’s not just America that’s facing these questions right now. So I wish it weren’t so timely.

However, I certainly felt that I needed to educate myself a little bit more before I bandied that word “fascism” around. I think we do need to look at our history to understand where we are and learn from the lessons that are available to us. Yeah, I guess that’s what I have to say. I think it’s useful. History is there for us as a resource to try and help guide us as we move forward.

AVC: I read that you are working next on an AI thriller, which feels like a real departure for you from these lush period pieces. Can you talk about that idea at all?

JW: Yeah, I don’t know, I guess I never set out to do period movies. I didn’t go, “I’m going to make a career of doing period movies.” It just kind of happened. I became fascinated by this script and these ideas in the AI film, and so I’ve been reading and researching that world. It’s also a little bit political. It feels like a story that needs telling.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.