Can ‘Ripley’ actor Andrew Scott really speak Italian?
Irish actor Andrew Scott has become one of Netflix’s most celebrated leading men this year with his performance as the titular con man in the platform’s flagship neo-noir miniseries Ripley. Tom Ripley manoeuvres his way in the lives of Dickie Greenleaf and Marge Sherbourne, before assuming the identity of the former and working to conceal a litany of crimes from the latter.
The series is set in various locations across Italy, and so Ripley ends up speaking Italian in several scenes to carry out his theft of Greenleaf’s identity. According to Scott’s own description of the role, “About 15% of it is acting in Italian.”
His Italian-speaking dialogue includes brief and formal conversations with service workers such as the doorman of his apartment building and a bank clerk. But there are other instances in which he has to discuss things at length. For instance, one scene in which Ripley’s landlady, who believes him to be Greenleaf, notices a newspaper article showing that one of his friends has been found dead in a car. “Ricardo,” she calls him, before asking him to explain the situation to her.
Scott recently told Jimmy Kimmel that acting in Italian was “genuinely terrifying”, especially because in the case of Tom Ripley, “he would be good at speaking Italian.” He elaborated that the levels of duplicity involved in his character’s behaviour made the task of speaking a foreign language even harder. “I’m also an Irishman playing an American imitating another American speaking Italian,” Scott said. He added that Greenleaf “would probably be less good at speaking Italian, so the way he speaks Italian would also have to differ.”
But could Scott speak Italian anyway?
While interviewing him, Kimmel joked with Scott that no one would be able to tell the difference between the various layers of Italian and American accents he was employing. He suggested to the actor that he must have had an American teach him to speak Italian.
“I had an Italian to teach me Italian,” Scott clarified, as he’d never learnt to speak the language before taking the part. Which explains why he found that aspect of his role so scary.
Nevertheless, he pulled it, with rave reviews from Italian critics and audiences alike complimenting his performance of dialogue in their language as “perfetto”. Scott nailed his impression of an American speaking fairly decent Italian, and many viewers have commented on his accomplished accent.
He won’t have to worry about struggling to get by on future holidays to the country, then. And he’ll likely be able to give his family and friends guided tours of Atrani, Sanremo, Rome and Venice, too. Scott could have done worse than choose a role set in some of Italy’s most beautiful places.