Rocco Siffredi, the king of porn, arrives on Netflix: “I have never masturbated in front of my films” | Television

Rocco Siffredi (Ortona, Italy, 59 years old) demonstrates an absolute lack of modesty, an enormous self-confidence, which seems directly linked to his groin, and also that tiredness that usually appears on the faces of those who have worked hard work and exhausting. After all, he turns 60 in May. “I thought they would never arrive, but here they are. I’m calm. “My sexuality is still in order, but it’s 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 arrives this Wednesday on Netflix. He will celebrate with a family trip to Congo to visit his favorite animal, the gorilla (!), a gift from his wife Rozsa Tassi, porn actress and former Miss Hungary, to whom he has been married for 30 years.

The series is fiction, although “98%” of it is real, Siffredi says. “The remaining 2% were left out to protect my family.” It all began in his hometown, Ortona, a small coastal town in Abruzzo known during the Second World War as the “little Stalingrad”: it was razed to the ground because the famous Gustav Line which delineated 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 matter to which this mammon, as they call mama’s boys in Italy, was particularly fond of—he ended up triumphing in Paris, the porn Olympus of the 1980s, and later in the Hollywood industry. The title responds to the name of his favorite superhero, protagonist of an erotic photo novel he was addicted to in his youth: “I discovered him when I was 11 or 12 and I wanted to be like him. “I was born for this.”

Siffredi is believed to have changed this discipline forever. He was the master of porn gonzo and he normalized violent 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. “She puts her whole soul into her films, you can see it,” said the French director. Siffredi accepted immediately, he said, to understand what it felt like to be considered an actor. Serious. “Supersex “It wants to reflect the cost of choosing this life, which is not so easy, even if people keep the fun part,” replies Siffredi, who seems to carry with him the doubt of knowing what would have happened to him if his penis had been measured some centimeter smaller, longer or wider. In reality, no one knows his measurements for sure. Its owner provided, according to the interview, figures ranging from 23 to 26 centimeters. Mystery, Buñuel said, is the key element of every work of art.

It’s a sign of the times: Netflix had the audacity to sell the series as a quasi-feminist project. The creator of Supersex is a woman, Francesca Manieri, known to this day as a screenwriter for The immensitywith Penélope Cruz, or the series We are who we are, by Luca Guadagnino. “The mission was to investigate masculinity and observe the level of toxicity in relationships between men and women, and the possibility of a new meeting between the two in this historical moment,” says Manieri, sitting next to his object of study and the actor who is played by Alessandro Borghi, with whom he has an unreasonable resemblance. Siffredi himself declared in 2016 that the perfect candidate was Michael Fassbender (for more details there is his film Shame).

“I was often described as an actor who resorted to violent sex, but I never felt like I was abusing anyone. I have always worked with everyone’s collaboration”

The series is a deliberate crossroads of neorealism soft – the miserable post-war Italy, the kind-hearted prostitute, the violent brother – and the imaginary garbage by Paolo Sorrentino, who seeks, as Manieri indicates, to deconstruct Siffredi’s masculinity. Has the interested party also deconstructed himself? Do you feel like you have mistreated women at some point? “I don’t think I treated them badly. Maybe I understand them better, but I’ve never had the feeling of doing something wrong,” he replies. “I have often been described as a performer violent, like an actor who resorts to violent sex. But this has never been a problem: I’ve always done it with people who agreed. I have never felt like I was abusing someone. I have always worked collaboratively with others.” He believes that this will have been his main innovation in the pornographic genre: having given subjectivity to women. “The funny thing is that in porn women have become like men. In today’s porn, the strongest are the women and not the men,” he says.

When asked why he got into porn, he always says 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,” he says. He would like that to be his legacy: his body -beware of polysemy- it was understood as a song to freedom, which for him is synonymous with debauchery. “The world is becoming more and more severe. “We lose the freedom we had gained,” 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 become porn stars. 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 own production company as well as the Siffredi Hard Academy, a sort of porn university that trains the stars of the future with extensive teaching . which includes a filmography of approximately 1,700 titles. Although he assures that, unlike other actors, he never revisits his work. “I have never masturbated to one of my films. It’s impossible, I can’t do it. I can watch the bits with the 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 reconciling love and sex; When I was young, I saw them as antagonistic things. Over the years she has changed her mind. “Sex with love, with feelings, is the best. “It’s something insurmountable,” she says. “But I am capable of doing it even without love.” He refers to the facts.

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