Michele Morrone has had a very good 2020

In 2020 much of the world collectively accepted a period of isolation and introspection, meanwhile the life of Michele Morrone rocketed into the stratosphere. Overnight the star of Netflix’s 365 Days transformed into one of the hottest properties on television, seizing the mantle of the man that men want to be and women want to be with.

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With the attention-span of digital- natives only able to be measured in nanoseconds, there are few things that cut right to the point like a meme. Produced on a near industrial-levels, the daily barrage of digital ‘content’ overflows our social feeds, group chats and office talk.

Timely, reactive and generally with mass appeal, the right image-and-caption combination can spread across the internet like wildfire—quicker, even. By comparison, the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic across the world is almost pedestrian in its virility.

A recent example of this did the rounds on Instagram the other day. It read: ‘2020 was a bad year for everyone, except for this guy’ plastered over a picture of a startlingly handsome man laughing. The ‘guy’ it was referring to was Michele Morrone.

Shirt by Dior; Watch by Rolex. Photo

“Yeah I saw that,” chuckles Morrone. “I feel bad for saying it, but the truth is 2020 was my lucky year!” he says with a shrug of his shoulders and showing the palm of his hands, in a typically animated Italian gesture signifying ‘what can I do about it?’.

The fact that a picture of Morrone has become internet shorthand for success in 2020 is testament to just the kind of year he has had. The 29-year-old Italian actor went from obscurity to fronting one of the most-watched films in the history of Netflix.

From struggling actor to an actor struggling to escape the attention of throngs of fans that now, quite literally, fall at his feet.

The film that strapped a rocket to Morrone’s career is ‘365 Days’— an erotic drama based on a best-selling Polish book about an Italian Mafioso who imprisons a woman for a period of 365 days, with the condition that he will let her go fall if she does not fall in love with him.

To say that the campy, over-stylised, hypersexualized film was not a critical success would be an understatement, however, to say that it was a success would be an even bigger understatement.

The summer of 2020 looked different than any other summer has looked in recent memory. The global pandemic forced virtually all cinemas to close, halted the release and production of pretty much all major releases, and pushed everyone indoors to seek entertainment.

For most of us, it was less a case of ‘Netflix and chill’, and more the case of Netflix all the time. The pandemic changed all of our lives, but perhaps not as dramatically as Morrone’s.

Shirt by Salvatore Ferragamo; Trousers by Loro Piana; Hat by Officina Italiana; Watch by Rolex; Shoes by Bally.

He was at home in Rome when the pandemic took hold, spending more than two months isolating in a country that was one of the worst affected by Covid-19, with more than 35,000 deaths.

“It was terrible,” he says. But during that time he tried to stay positive and concentrate on making art. “I locked myself at home writing new songs and painting. The pandemic was something incredibly bad for the whole world. But there is an opportunity in the experience, too, to help us understand who we are.” Who he was, was a struggling artist who had just had his first acting break.

The film, 365 Days, had had a cinematic release in Poland pre-Covid, and he had even released his debut album Dark Room.

“The book was a best-seller in Poland, so I assumed the film would be pretty big there and I though, hey, maybe I’ll be big in Poland,” says Morrone as he plucks a cigarette from its packet and lights it.

“I knew it would be good exposure, but I was not expecting all of this. I was not expecting Forbes to be proclaiming it as the most watched film in the history of Netflix.”

It is mid-morning on a fresh, sunny day and he is settling into storytelling mode, having taken a break from the Esquire photoshoot at the Flamingo Room in Dubai’s Jumeirah Al Naseem hotel.

“When Netflix decided to distribute it, I knew it would be good exposure, but I was not expecting all of this. I was not expecting Forbes to be proclaiming it as the most watched film in the history of Netflix,” he says.

“You have to understand,” he begins, “the night the film premiered on Netflix, I went to sleep and I had 48k followers [on Instagram]. When I woke up I had 2.1 million.” His eyes go wide and wild when he recounts the story, every now and then he shakes his head.

Sweatshirt, by BOSS; Scarf, by Dior; Sunglasses, by Salvatore Ferragamo

“I was shocked, so I went down the street to drink a coffee near where I was living in Rome, and I could see people starting to stare at me. So I got in my car and went somewhere else, but the same sort of thing was happening, with people coming up to me wanting to take selfies. I ended up having to go home and lock the door.” Even though he has probably told this story countless times since that June morning, five months later you still get the sense that he hardly believes it himself.

Although we loathe to use a cliché, by his own omission Morrone’s career is an overnight success story. While he slept, his face became instantly recognizable to millions of people across the world.

His classic, tall-dark-and-handsome leading man good looks and the sexualized nature of the film made him the new prime target for tabloids, gossip magazines and hordes of fan girls (and women)— he became the man that your wife and her friends were talking about in what would be best described as ‘locker room talk’.

“The night the film premiered on Netflix, I went to sleep and I had 48k followers [on Instagram]. When I woke up I had 2.1 million.”

Morrone explains how in the weeks following more than 50 acting roles had been thrown his way. All of a sudden he had multiple managers, a couple of lawyers, a bodyguard— everyone drawn to his newly acquired lightning in a bottle.

The life-changing success however, should not diminish the years of graft and hard work that Morrone had put in up to that point. In stark contrast to his current situation—sitting in the Dubai sun talking to Esquire while passersby try to covertly snap pictures of him—just a couple of years before he was broke, having recently divorced his wife and in the midst of a downward spiral of self-doubt with regards to his future as an actor or singer.

With acting gigs few and far between he retreated to a small Italian village called Durazzano in the north of the country to work as a gardener for €400 a month.

Morrone recounts the story of the night he received a random call from 365 Days director Tomasz Mandes: “He had got my number from my agent, who I had already told that I was giving up on acting and playing music,” he says. “The director said: ‘Listen, I don’t know you, but I need you’.

He told me that he had already booked me a ticket to Poland for the next morning and if I wanted to get on the flight then great, otherwise, no hard feelings.”

The next morning Morrone was supposed to be cutting the grass in a local park, but he called his boss and feigned being sick. Instead, he packed a little bag (“just one underwear and a pair of socks”) and got on the flight. When he arrived a three-year contract was already ready waiting for him to sign.

“Only after that did they even send me the script. I remember thinking: ‘I don’t think I’m going to go back to the park anymore!’ It’s fair to say that it has been a non-stop rollercoaster ride since then.

Shirt by Salvatore Ferragamo; Trousers by Sunflower; Shoes by Bally.

Not only has Morrone’s acting career taken off, but he also recorded four songs for the soundtrack of 365 Days—which he sings in English as opposed to his native Italian.

“I learnt to speak English from my first wife,” he says before cheekily adding “first and last!” Morrone met Lebanese stylist Rouba Saadeh in 2013, and were married within a year. Unfortunately their marriage ended in 2018, but they have two sons together.

“When we met she didn’t speak any Italian and I didn’t speak English, so I really wanted to learn for her. At first I was playing it all cute, pointing at things I didn’t know the words of and making her laugh, but then I asked her to speak to me only in English. At some point you have to get over the romanticism and get on with learning it properly,” he says.

According to Morrone, the two are still close despite the fact that he is constantly travelling, while Saadeh and their sons are living in Lebanon.

Thankfully, the family were not near the explosion that rocked Beirut’s port area in August this year. “As a father you are immediately terrified at the thought of something like that happening anywhere close to them,” Morrone explains.

“My ex-wife called me to say that they were all safe, and 15 minutes later I had bought them all tickets to fly to Italy to stay with me. Unfortunately, the situation in Lebanon is very tough at the moment, and I don’t know when it will get better.”

Among his many tattoos – 19 and counting – is one stamped across the back of his left hand. It reads the Marilyn Manson lyric: ‘Everyone will come to my funeral to make sure that I stay dead’. It’s not the kind of tattoo that would belong to a shrinking violet.

During the shoot he is a ball of charisma. Charming and flirty, it dawns upon me that the crew is disproportionately made up of women, with more hanger-oners appearing throughout the shoot—which doesn’t seem to be a coincidence—and he is completely in his element.

I’m perfectly aware of what I look like, and that a lot of people like the way I look, act and talk— but trust me, when I am with my oldest friends, I am pretty much the furthest thing from a sex symbol,”

“I’m perfectly aware of what I look like, and that a lot of people like the way I look, act and talk— but trust me, when I am with my oldest friends, I am pretty much the furthest thing from a sex symbol,” he says. How would his friends describe him? “As an idiot,” he says with a chuckle, “but an idiot who is very loyal.”

With every perk of fame comes its perils, and Morrone has had a sharp introduction to that with almost daily occurrences of someone wanted to take a picture of him or, on the rare occasion, something worse.

While he starts telling a couple of lighthearted stories of fans that have literally collapsed in excitement mid-selfie, he then shuffles uncomfortably in his seat and pauses as if to make up his mind whether he would be comfortable retelling another, more sinister, story.

“One time I was in Poland speaking in front of a crowd, and a guy managed to get on to the stage and tried to attack me. My bodyguard managed to tackle him before he reached me, but it really shook me up,” he says looking vulnerable for the first time that day.

“I didn’t do anything to that guy, but obviously when people see me, they see [my 365 Days character] Massimo and they cannot separate that from the fiction. After it happened, I really wanted to talk to the guy. I didn’t care what he’d done, I just wanted to understand, or at least make him understand, that I didn’t do anything to him personally. It has stayed with me, because he really wanted to hurt me.”

As a grafter, Morrone knows firsthand that you don’t get anything for free in this world. But you get the feeling that he wouldn’t have it any other way.

When asked whether he has sacrificed his personal freedom for a professional one, his answer is definitive: “Exactly.” He laments the fact that it is near impossible to go to the beach with his kids, or go out for an ice cream without donning some comically large sunglasses, or that he now often cannot go to his friend’s birthday parties, but professionally, and mentally, he is thriving.

“One time I was in Poland speaking in front of a crowd, and a guy managed to get on to the stage and tried to attack me. My bodyguard managed to tackle him before he reached me.”

Netflix has already signed him up for the second and third installments of 365 Days, and he is currently learning Spanish for a lead role in another unnamed Netflix project that begins filming in February.

“Today I am the man that I always wanted to be, because I worked hard. If I want to continue being this man then I need to continue just working hard,” he says with a shrug.

Photography: Ausra Osipaviciute // Fashion & Styling: Ninorta Malke // Location: Flamingo Room by Tashas, Jumeirah Al Naseem, Dubai

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