‘The Great Beauty’ Actor Toni Servillo to Play ‘Last Godfather’ Matteo Messina Denaro in Drama by ‘Sicilian Ghost Story’ Directors

variety.com:

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Toni Servillo, who played Roman socialite Jep Gambardella in Paolo Sorrentino’s Oscar-winning “The Great Beauty,” will appear as Cosa Nostra boss Matteo Messina Denaro, dubbed “the last godfather,” in upcoming drama “Iddu” directed by Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza (“Sicilian Ghost Story”).

After being on the run for three decades, Messina Denaro was arrested in mid-January 2023 outside an upscale medical facility in Palermo, where he had been undergoing cancer treatment for a year under false identity.

The top mafioso, convicted of masterminding some of Italy’s most heinous slayings – including the killings of prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino,and the grisly murder of a Mafia turncoat’s young son, who was strangled before his body was dissolved in a vat of acid – subsequently died last September in a maximum-security prison.

The hotly-anticipated drama – the title “Iddu” means “Him” in Sicilian dialect – marks Grassadonia and Piazza’s third feature after “Salvo,” about a Mafia hitman who falls in love with his target’s blind sister, and “Sicilian Ghost Story,” another non-conventional Mafia pic that mixed fairlytale tropes with the harsh reality of a mob kidnapping. “Sicilian Ghost Story” opened the Cannes Critics’ Week in 2017 and was released by Strand Releasing in the U.S.