Mussolini: Son of the Century

Joe Wright's Mussolini: Son of the Century (M — Il figlio del secolo) premiered Out of Competition at the Venice Film Festival in 2024 as one of the most-anticipated Italian-prestige series of the year. The eight-part Sky Italia/Lovely Rita Films production was widely received as one of the most ambitious recent works of European political-historical television, and consolidated Wright, after his earlier theatrical features, as a director capable of substantial long-form prestige-television commitment. Adapted from Antonio Scurati's 2018 Premio Strega-winning novel.

The series follows the rise of Benito Mussolini (Luca Marinelli, in the lead role widely covered as the most-discussed Italian acting performance of 2024) from his post-First-World-War political activism through the founding of the Fascist movement and the eventual establishment of the Italian fascist state in the early 1920s. Francesco Russo, Barbara Chichiarelli and Benedetta Cimatti anchor the supporting ensemble. Wright's commitment to a faster, more newsreel-influenced visual register than typical period-historical prestige drama is one of the show's most-discussed structural commitments.

The series operates simultaneously as political-historical reconstruction, biographical character study, and direct intervention in the broader continuing Italian political-cultural conversation about how the fascist era is publicly remembered. Marinelli's central performance — physically transformative, accent-driven, sustained across all eight hours — was widely covered as the moment that confirmed his international leading-actor career. The series's release coincided with continuing political-cultural attention to the Italian government's relationship to the broader European far-right tradition.