Toni Servillo and Carlo Verdone will be the stars of the series of encounters organized by the EXTRA Section during the upcoming third edition of the Rome Film Fest. Each of the two actors will choose the scenes he likes best from the other’s oeuvre, and both will comment on them together with Mario Sesti, Artistic Director for EXTRA.

Like Marco Bellocchio and Bernardo Bertolucci for the Fest’s first edition, the two actors will be the protagonists of “Duetto”, the popular format of talks with the stars dedicated to Italian cinema, which has invited dozens of actors and filmmakers to take the stage at Rome’s Auditorium Parco della Musica, before an audience of aficionados and the press alike. Marquee names in the footlights have included: Mario Monicelli, Ciprì and Moresco, Silvio Muccino, Riccardo Scamarcio, Stefania Sandrelli, Margherita Buy, Paolo Virzì, Gabriele Muccino, Sergio Rubini, Fabrizio Bentivoglio, and many more.

“In common with every great comic actor, Carlo possesses an extraordinary quality: he never lets his ego take center stage,” says Toni Servillo of Verdone. “He manages to split himself into an infinite series of individual characters. It’s as if he has a ‘super public’ inside which he has to reckon with every time.”

“I feel that he’s the most authoritative actor on the Italian scene today,” says Carlo Verdone, in turn, of Toni Servillo. “His face, his physicality, the way he handles a scene – they are all the outward expressions of an inner philosophy that allows him to play roles that are at once dramatic and mysterious.”

Mario Sesti explains it like this: “Ever since they met for the first time at the David di Donatello Awards three years ago, and compared notes on the scenes they each liked best from the other’s films, I’ve seen their friendship grow, thanks to a genuine mutual esteem. I proposed the idea of this talk with them right then and there, but with all their multiple commitments, we never could agree on a date during either the first of second edition of the Rome Film Fest. Actually, I think it’s even better that this encounter, a real inaugural party for Italian cinema, will be taking place now, at the height of a splendid season that has seen an outstanding showing by Italian films, both at the box office and at the world’s leading festival, Cannes.”

Toni Servillo, one of the most significant figures in contemporary Italian theater as both an actor and director (he staged Goldoni’s Villeggiatura Trilogy, which garnered critical and audience acclaim), stars in the two Italian films that won the Grand Prize and the Jury Award respectively at Cannes 2008: Gomorra and Il Divo. In addition, he won the David di Donatello Award for Best Actor for his role in La Ragazza del lago (The Girl by the Lake).

Carlo Verdone, whom Goffredo Fofi has called the only true heir to Alberto Sordi, also got his start on the stage, and has recently made a return to that extraordinary talent for mimicry that got him noticed on the independent theater scene back in the 70s, with the film Grande, grosso, e Verdone, in which he reinterprets three of the characters that made him the Italian audience’s best-loved contemporary actor.

Both stars will be meeting the public (tickets will be on sale) and the press during the third edition of the Rome Film Fest, which this year will run fromOctober 22nd to 31st.