A year ago, Irene Maiorino arrived in New York for the first time, carrying with her the weight of a story that didn’t belong to her alone. She was there to present the fourth season of My Brilliant Friend at the MoMA, during the Tribeca Film Festival — a story that had slipped into her voice and her body, that had changed the shape of her silences.
After the screening, she boarded a train, alone, and rode it to the end — Coney Island. It was there, in that frayed corner of the American city, that something stirred. Not in the skyline or the buildings, but in the air: that same dense, electric stillness she knew from the Rione Luzzatti. The tension of things unsaid, unresolved. The sense of a place where life presses against the walls, looking for an exit.
She’s returning now. On May 8, 2025, at 6:30 PM, she will speak at NYU’s Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò in an event titled Being Lila: Women’s Voices Between Rebellion and Silence in Southern Italy. It is not just a conversation about a TV series or a book. It’s about what happens when a woman — or a character — refuses to behave, to fit in, to be easy.
Lila Cerullo, the character she played, remains with her — not as a shadow, but as a pulse. “She didn’t shift how I understand freedom”, Maiorino says. “She deepened it”. Lila chooses her own path in a time and place where doing so meant being erased. She trades comfort for integrity, violence for solitude. She doesn’t ask for help. She doesn’t wait for permission.
There’s something sharp, almost painful, in Lila’s clarity. “Ferrante wrote her with brutal precision”, Maiorino says. “She’s more defined than any other woman in the saga. That’s what condemns her: when you’re that clear, life doesn’t go easy on you — especially if you’re a woman, especially in the South”.
And yet, playing her wasn’t about showing strength. It was about erasing performance. “The hardest part”, she says, “was not acting her. Not mimicking her fire, but staying inside it. Lila is made of tension. Of restraint. I had to strip everything away — no poses, no drama. Just what was real”.
That process, of subtraction and return, left marks. “As you grow older, you start to smooth your edges. You get tired. You adapt. But when I worked on Lila, I returned to that earlier version of myself — the one who didn’t care if she was liked. That rebellion. That honesty. It felt like a homecoming”.
Some moments won’t let go. One in particular: the smarginatura. The dissolving edges. A technically complex scene, yes — darkness, extras, camera movement. But that wasn’t the heart of it. “Smarginare”, she says, “isn’t about falling apart. It’s about seeing too much. It’s when the world’s boundaries blur and everything outside crashes into you. Lila squints because reality is tearing open. She tells Elena: ‘What happens outside, to me it always happens inside’. That moment — it’s enormous”.
Before My Brilliant Friend, Maiorino was in 1994 — blonde, almost unrecognizable — and in Gomorrah, Il commissario Ricciardi, and a number of Italian indie films. But this role, this character asked for something else. Not transformation, but honesty.
The upcoming event in New York isn’t just about Lila, or Ferrante, or the screen. It’s about the fault lines women still walk today. “People talk as if things have changed”, Maiorino says. “But resistance is everywhere. In the roles. In the way you’re looked at. Sure, I have more of a voice now. But speaking isn’t the same as being heard. Especially when you’re saying something that makes people uncomfortable”.
And if Lila lived now — not in fiction, but in the flesh? “She wouldn’t be on a stage”, she says. “She’d be in the streets, among the women, inside the movement. Not a symbol, not a heroine. A real presence. Still stubborn. Still burning.”
