Peaky Blinders, the Best Drama Series is issuing a 5th series for 2019

London (Francesca Bizzarri e Caterina de Martino) – Peaky Blinders has been awarded as the Best Drama Series TV BAFTAs and the creators have announced that Peaky Blinders will return for a fifth serie in 2019. 

Most of the English people knows – or at least have heard about – the worldwide success of the drama serie Peaky Blinders, available on Netflix and Amazon Prime.

For those who want to discover for the first time the story, here you go some insights reported as well as a short briefing of our interview with Luca Zizzari who interprets ‘Matteo’ in the series. 

So, having understood it is a British crime drama, Peaking Blinders was born by an idea of Steven Knight and now aired on BBC Two since 13 September 2013. The serie takes place in Birmingham after the conclusion of World War I and it deals with the events involving the Peaky Blinders gang, composed by the members of the Shelby family. Particularly, the focus is on the ambitious boss and patriarch Tom Shelby (Cillian Murphy), left disillusioned after his experience in war. Unfortunately for them, they comes to the attention of the Chief Inspector Chester Campbell (Sam Neill), a detective sent from Belfast by Winston Churchill to suppress disorders in Birmingham. Gradually the gang starts to distinguish itself entering in international traffics.

About the third season, where the gang’s world starts to become more dangerous, TV news company Screen Rant has said: “The season revolves around the notion of social classes and empires, and how they rise and fall with a startling sort of predictability. As the show suggests, over time, empires become too big, too corrupt, and too complicated to sustain themselves and eventually, they collapse.”

But what is the secret of such an huge success?

We think that the key is in the attention that the creator pays to the details. Above all, impressive is his ability to link the events that happen to a single family to the history of Birmingham in those years, of which the whole drama is a great celebration.

The creators have announced that Peaky Blinders will return for a fifth serie in 2019.

Who is Luca Zizzari? 

Credit: Bluvelvet.com / Luca Zizzari, Peaky Blinders’ actor who interprets ‘Matteo’

In the 4th season of Peaky Blinders is involved the Italian actor Luca Zizzari, who plays the rule of Matteo, the brilliant branch of the famous American actor and producer Adrien Broody (Luca Ciangretta in the tv serie). Luca Zizzari comes from Legnano, a small Italian city near Milan, and with his hard work has been able to study drama in the UK. After an attempt to attend university in Italy and in the United Kingdom he dropped his studies to focus his energies on the labour market. He decided to take up different jobs to learn English in a more appropriate way earning some money at the same time. His jobs went from working in an airline company to teaching to children with down syndrome. In fact, his dream couldn’t have become true if he wasn’t enough determined to face everyday problems. At least this is what he said in the interview he had with us, in which he stated how important his passion has been in his career, the same determination that set the sparkle into fire. As the actor said to us, in the acting world, as well as in the acting business, based on more economic stuff, you don’t have just to hope that things will come on your way: you truly have to trust in yourself.

“There are negative aspects in hope, but not in faith; you have to believe in yourself first and then in your career, accepting that what you’re doing is real. There’s no secret formula, if that’s what you want to do and still no success, you just have to keep going.” – Luca Zizzari said on London One Radio and then he underlined: 

“Self-confidence is about competence: if you know what you’re doing and you believe in what you do, that’s the right direction. Enjoying what you do meanwhile earning money, that’s it.”

His rule in Peaky Blinder came after his first movie, that he did with his wife too. In this drama Zizzari, as an upstanding citizen, had the possibility to appreciate and not to judge the gangster lifestyle. He felt deeply connected to the emotional condition of the character he plays and in general compassionate about this choice of living.

The talented actor revealed that he is actually taking part of a new film with his wife’s help: in this project is included the collaboration with the well known director Carlo Gabriel Nero (Franco Nero’s son, the famous Italian actor).

Discover more by listening to the whole interview listen to:

 

 

I Medici: Masters of Florence – A REVIEW

by Mirianna la Grasta

Sitting in an endless and luxuriant vineyard, Oscar-winning actor Dustin Hoffman looks more Italian than he actually is. “What a beauty,” he murmurs while enjoying the breath-taking view of Florence and a bunch of Tuscan red grapes.

In the new historical drama I Medici: Masters of Florence, Hoffman plays Giovanni de’Medici, the forefather of the House of Medici. This was one of Europe’s most powerful banking families and political dynasties, who governed the Republic of Florence during the 15th century.

I Medici has no rivals in its genre. Unlike Neil Jordan’s The Borgias and Michael Hirst’s The Tudors, this series is much more accurate in terms of historical details. Settings and costumes accurately reproduce the period in which the story takes place.

Created by Frank Spotnitz and Nicholas Meyer, and directed by Sergio Mimica-Gezzan, the drama makes the viewer curious. The first episode, Original Sin, opens with the death of Giovanni de’Medici, killed by a hooded character who had poisoned the red grapes of his vineyard.

“Who’s the murderer?” wonder the sons Cosimo de’Medici (Richard Madden), and Lorenzo de’Medici (Stuart Martin). This question is the driving force behind the series, as it extends to the audience and drags them into the quest for their father’s assassin. Giovanni’s death also turns out to be the perfect excuse to carry the public into a cultural journey.

Simple and austere, I Medici’s setting moves from darkness to light, from the late Middle-Ages to the dawn of Renaissance, flashing back and forward in time. The Medici House is therefore depicted in two different periods, 1430 and 1450, and the drama successfully portrays the brothers Cosimo and Lorenzo when they were 20 and 40 years old. The costume and makeup design in the series captures the differences between the two periods in an outstanding way. Every single detail concerning the actors is given visible importance, and faithfully adjusts to the chosen period.

The Italian artistic masterpieces crown the drama. The cities of Firenze, Montepulciano, Bracciano, Pienza and Viterbo host the story of a family with its problems, passions and strengths. The international cast ranges from well-known actors to rising stars, and it includes the impressive performances of Annabel Scholey, Guido Caprino, Brian Cox and Valentina Bellé.

A highly accomplished and captivating series, filmed in English and produced by RAI, I Medici glues its public to the screen, dragging it into an intriguing mix of history and mystery.

The original English-language series is now available on Netflix. The Italian-language version of the drama can be found on RAI Play.