“Are you ready for a ride?” Valeria Golino asks me as I sit down for our interview. 

She’s referring to the copy of Goliarda Sapienza’s novel The Art of Joy I’m holding, which the kind folks at Cinecittà have just gifted me. Golino is in London for Cinema Made in Italy, a five-day film festival organized through a partnership between the legendary Italian studios Cinecittà, the Italian Cultural Institute London, and the British Film Institute. 

The book is fundamentally relevant to the sultry, talented, ultra-feminine Golino because she not only stars as its real-life writer in Mario Martone’s 2025 film Fuori — one of four titles the actress is featured in at the London festival — but also because, wearing the director’s hat Golino sometimes dons, she has also helmed the six-part eponymous television movie based on the epic Sicilian novel for Sky Studios. “I hope one day you’ll watch my series…” Golino adds, sensing what is sure to become my deep connection to the semi-autobiographical story of a woman born in the early 20th century whose quest for freedom bypasses conventions. 

When I ask her whether she would like to do our interview in English or Italian — Golino is wonderfully fluent in both, plus Greek and French — she answers, “Both, we can do whatever we want, we’re free.” Women’s freedom and the price we pay for it is at the center of each of the films that Golino stars in this year at CMII, which also include a small part in Elisa by Leonardo Di Costanzo, a central cameo in A Brief Affair, the debut directing venture by renowned screenwriter Ludovica Rampoldi, and the title role in Gioia by Nicolangelo Gelormini, who co-directed The Art of Joy with Golino. In Gioia, the actress is unrecognizable, a short scraggly wig hiding her beautiful curls, and sporting thick dark rimmed glasses as she plays a quiet, introverted 50-something French literature professor whose controlling parents have impeded her natural coming of age, until a student in her school changes everything, taking her and the audience on a rollercoaster ride of a story.  

“You devastated me in Gioia,” I confess to Golino. “[Gelormini] is such a talented director,” she replies, “who has made something that dark, because it is dark and it is just very, very unsettling, into something also luminous — I think there is something very luminous in it!” 

Golino is someone who has managed to work in Italian and European while having made Hollywood her home from the late 80s through the 1990s. After being discovered by epic Italian filmmaker Lina Wertmüller at the age of 16, Golino went on to act in Barry Levinson’s award-winning film Rain Man, starring Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise, took part in the comedy franchise Hot Shots!, and was featured in Mike Figgis’ 1995 film Leaving Las Vegas, starring Nicolas Cage. 

Since then, she has been featured in the work of filmmakers like Julie Taymor, who directed her in Frida, Nanni Moretti, who walked with Golino in Quiet Chaos, Michel Leclerc for The Very Private Life of Mister Sim, Céline Sciamma in Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and played Maria Callas’ sister Yakinthi in Pablo Larraín’s Maria, starring Angelina Jolie. A great casting choice, it turns out, as Golino’s mother is a Greek artist. Her late father was a Neapolitan Germanist, and she spent her childhood traveling between the two places after her parents’ divorce.

When not in front of the camera, “I’ve made more than 120 films,” she says. Golino finds time to write and direct, starting with a short film in 2010 titled Armandino e il madre and then with her features, both screened in Cannes, Miele and Euforia. And of course, her latest venture, The Art of Joy, along with a few producing credits, rounds out her busy schedule. 

While three of the films she stars in at this London festival are based on true stories, the films she chooses to direct and co-write have all been fiction. “I don't prefer to do real stories or fictional stories, I like to do something that is poignant and interesting and can make me change my mind about things…whatever scares me a little bit, whatever makes me uneasy, whatever makes me go deeper into something where I normally wouldn’t go…that's what cinema should be doing.” Golino adds that portraying real people who are no longer living, as she does in both Fuori and Gioia, the latter based on the true story of the 2016 murder of Gloria Rosboch, carries an extra layer of responsibility. “Stories of death or of somebody who is not here anymore, you have to be very careful with, in how you treat these people that you're portraying because they are not there to defend themselves anymore…even [to defend themselves] from you.”

Golino has confessed in past interviews that she’s thought of the struggles in her youth as atonement for the success that was to come. “Well, I guess I'm a Catholic!” she says. “Whether I like it or not, but I don't think that rationally — I feel that irrationally, which are two different things.” Golino also has a habit of getting hurt, she tells me, “when I'm starting to do something that is important to me, I get hurt. I fall all the time. I fall, I get hurt. That's part of me. And always, my first thought is like, ‘Oh, okay, okay, I got hurt. So this is going to be okay.’”

Golino giggles at my statement that “60 is the new 30,” as she’s hit that milestone, with style, beauty and no sense of slowing down. “I work more now than I ever worked before,” she confesses, “I’ve worked all my life and I've been lucky that way, but the great thing is that a woman in her 60s, 20 years ago, she would not work more than ever. I remember how it was and it’s changed a lot. And that's one good thing that has happened in this crazy business.” I propose that it is thanks to women like her, Meryl Streep, and Emma Thompson who have made that possible for all other women. “And Susan Sarandon,” Golino chimes in “I’ve known her a little bit for a long time, and she came to do a movie in Italy [The Echo Chamber with Alicia Vikander] a few months ago, and everybody said that she [Sarandon] was the sexiest woman on that set.”

From “sexiest” we move quickly to “sexism” which is another topic Golino is passionate about. “I'm not sexist, I just can’t be,” she confesses, “I do see the differences, I do see the good and the bad. I don't even like it when they tell me “you did it better because you're a woman.” I hate that!” She adds, “are there certain things that we do differently? Yes, of course — but there's not better or worse, just different.”

For our interview Golino wears Italian and English designers, combining a Paul Smith silk blouse worn unbuttoned, revealing a diamond pendant, and a black wool Prada skirt, with boots. She plays with her scarf while she tells me, “I like fashion, I do, and over the years I’ve developed a lot of relationships with brands — it's something that’s part of my job too, somehow, you know, fashion and cinema do have affairs.” But she’s not obsessed with fashion, to use her word. “Let’s put it this way. It's part of all kinds of tools that I have in my possession and I do like beautiful objects and I like to look pretty, of course, but I don't like to the dress to be the thing.” She elaborates, “I don’t like to become a ‘product,’ a mannequin, a product of things and objects, I don’t like that kind of stuff at all,” and “not being on social media, it works. And one of the reasons I’m not is so I don’t have to enter into that territory of having to sell something.” But Golino still likes it when someone pays her a compliment, and is typically well-fashioned, from the stage of the Marrakech Film Festival, while handing Sean Penn an honorary award, to the red carpet in Cannes while she’s serving on the jury, to the Venice Film Festival where she’s likely promoting her latest film. 

For her next directorial venture, audiences will have to wait a bit, as Golino just started writing and admits, “I’m still at the point where I’m very scared and I’m not happy. But I usually cross through it this way, it’s my way.” Meanwhile, she’ll next be seen in Petrichor by artist turned filmmaker Marco Perego opposite Isabella Rossellini as well as in Italian director Gianni Amelio’s tentatively titled Nessun dolore (No pain), the latter project the reason why Golino is sporting this straight hair look. “I am a different woman when I have curly hair,” she admits, as we say goodbye, for now.