Finding the ‘Crack of Humanity’ in My Brilliant Friend

The penultimate episode of My Brilliant Friend brings with it the most shocking event in Elena Ferrante’s tetralogy. Lila, the eponymous friend to narrator Elena “Lenù� Greco, had always maintained a notorious, hard-scrabbling implacability alternately admired and despised by her more accomplished friend. But on an ordinary Sunday, as families loiter on a busy street, Lila’s cherished daughter Tina disappears as if she evaporated into thin air. It’s the moment that gives the final book the ominous title The Story of the Lost Child and leaves Lenù (played in the fourth season by Alba Rohrwacher) to reckon with Lila’s (Irene Maiorino) near-mythical breakdown.

Even as a child, Lila possessed a strange, quasi-supernatural inner force that emerged in moments of rebuke or fear. In the face of tragedy, the armor protecting her interior fragility comes undone, and the same intense force of will that may or may not have exploded a copper pot or ignited fire to a poster directs itself inward. Spiraling, Lila becomes even more inscrutable, a witchlike figure haunting the neighborhood with the despair of her loss. Maiorino calls the character’s final transformation the “crack.� “I felt a responsibility to give the audience permission to recognize themselves in this huge character,� she says. “The crack you see in the wall is the crack of humanity.�

With this fourth and final season, you took over Lila from Gaia Girace. The character is in a totally new place in her life; she’s a mother, she’s a businesswoman, and she’s a fully developed adult. Did those changes make the character feel new and fresh to you?
What I did first was work on the physical characteristics I saw in Gaia’s work. The way she purses the lips, the way she becomes angry — I really wanted to strike a balance between what she did and my own exploration. I took a very long journey inside Lila before shooting. This time was important for me, because it was my structure — which I could lose some of through my work with Alba and Laura Bispuri, who directed this season. As an actress, you have to be brave and able to explore your character on set. It changed a lot.

I know that I look like Gaia. The casting process took about two, three years, including COVID. They first had me audition at the end of season two, when they started looking around for an actress. I never lost Lila in those two, three years; she was always with me. She went with me on my holidays. I was a little bit scared to play her in the fourth season because it’s the hardest time for Lila, so what I did was to go deeper and deeper in the crack she hides in — from everyone except for Elena, of course. I worked a lot on that crack, which at the end explodes in a very strong way.

In the books, Ferrante writes that when Lila is really focused on something, she narrows her eyes. There’s a thread from Gaia’s performance to yours that shows that characteristic. When I first watched the fourth season, I was like, Oh my God, these two women look exactly alike. Not only physically but also in the intensity of the character and what’s coming from inside out: the eyes, the seething, the way she moves. 
The physical follows the emotion. That’s very important to me, because everybody says, “You look exactly like Gaia.� But it’s not enough. They didn’t cast me for three years! They wanted to see if I had, maybe, the strength, the fearlessness that Lila needs to have.

Lila has a complicated relationship to motherhood. Her pregnancies are painful and unpleasant, especially compared to Lenù’s. And her relationship to her son, Gennaro, frays as he spirals deeper into drug abuse. Then Tina comes along and Lila now has this perfect child. How did you think about the differences in her relationships to her two children? 
Gennaro is like a nightmare for Lila in a way — he represents something she rejects. He is a son of violence. This is a very important point for Lila, because the emancipation of women plays a pivotal role in Elena Ferrante’s books. Lila is a real feminist. She fights for emancipation, but not with words, as Elena did and Elena Ferrante also did, but with actions. She fights against patriarchal society. Gennaro represents this world she doesn’t want anymore. Tina, on the other hand, is the new: the new behavior, the new hope. She also represents Lila’s destiny. I worked with the question, How can you live and fight against your destiny if your destiny is in your body? The reborn Lila is a kid, but she represents Lila’s destiny.

Another important thing about Tina is that she is a daughter of love. Lila is empowered, she’s strong, and she falls in love with that new dynamic. For the first time, she’s really engaged in this relationship. You see the character climb up to the top of the hill. Then the fall is deeper.

The moment Tina disappears, Lenù is the first to ask, “Where’s Tina?� and Lila is like, “You know how kids are. She must have wandered around somewhere.� As you realize something is actually wrong, your face gradually falls. Lila retreats into a dreamlike state, as if she were surrendering to something. How did you come to that reaction? Did you know right away how you were going to interpret that moment, or did it come through digging into that emotional state? 
There are some scenes you can’t prepare for in your head. You can only go with your emotional flow. This kind of scene is about lots of work before, and then it’s about trust. You have to trust the process because it’s necessary that something comes up.

There are some characters like Lila that are archetypes — they are big. I felt a responsibility to give the audience permission to recognize themselves in this huge character and in her cracks. In this scene, you have to see immediately that something changes in one second. There’s no time to understand better. Lenù says, “Where’s Tina?� In the time it takes to end the conversation, there’s something that pulls me by my hair and puts me in my nightmare. I worked with opposites. Lila’s very tough, but she’s fragile. She’s a very good-looking woman, but in another way, she’s like a witch, especially at the end. There is Lila’s inner behavior, and there is the public persona. I worked on duality in this scene in a very strong way.

There’s another scene a few episodes earlier, during Marcello and Elisa’s wedding, when Alfonso gets kicked out of the party. Alfonso and Lenù are talking, and Lila is just kind of standing there, quiet. She doesn’t say anything, but you can see all these emotions in your face: She’s angry, she’s sad, she’s maybe feeling guilty about her responsibility — she encouraged this violent relationship between Alfonso and Michele Solara. Can you talk about that moment? 
I really appreciate that you’re talking about two scenes that don’t seem to go together. At the wedding, we see Lila in power in an external way. It’s only her public persona, but internally, she’s fragile. You can see the vibration that involves the exterior. It’s like a stone: Inside me, there were lots of emotions that I didn’t want to show. This fight creates the scene, because you’re seeing the opposite. I didn’t want to hide it so that you only saw a very strong woman. That’s not interesting. I want the two opposites. When Tina disappeared, I completely switched off my head. The noises around me, the people, the cars, the children, everything disappeared with Tina. I walked around like an alien. It’s a void. The earth beneath your feet is broken. So in the wedding scene, you see a stone inside of which there’s lots of emotion. In the disappearance of Tina, you see lots of noises and people, but inside you see the void.

There’s one other moment besides Tina’s disappearance where I think Lila is all void and emotion. Shortly after the earthquake, she talks about her fear of the dissolving boundaries. It strikes me that this fear is always on Lila’s mind, but for the viewer and Lenù, we only learn of it in that moment. We only know what Lila chooses to say. How present was the dissolving-boundaries thing for you throughout the season? Did it influence how you were thinking about how Lila would react to things? 
Are you talking about the boundaries in Lila, or the boundaries between me as an actress and the work?

Oh, interesting. I meant with Lila, but I guess both?
[Laughs.] I have some things in common with Lila. In Italian, we say smarginatura. Elena Ferrante wrote about smarginatura, and exactly as Lila said during the monologue, that was maybe the strongest ever.

These are huge, immense scenes. Elena Ferrante explains that the earthquake was an exterior thing. It happened to everybody, but what everybody was afraid of was what they saw outside of themselves. Lila spoke about her way of staying alive in this world, and this is why she narrows her eyes sometimes — not because she needs to see more, but because she’s afraid to see a lot. In Italian we say vedente — we mean someone who is blind but understands the world well. Lila’s power is to see more and see much better than everybody. At one point, she says, “Oh Lenù, everyone speaks about their life how they want to speak about it; not for what it is, but for what they want it to be.� Their story is the way they want to see their life. But Lila says, “No, this is the world, Lenù. The crack you see in the wall is the crack of humanity.�

I always felt like Lila was in touch with something mysterious, or supernatural, maybe — something outside of the grasp of us mere mortals. You mentioned that Lila is like a witch. In this episode, she steps into that role more consciously — her hair is graying, it’s stringy and unbrushed, and she wears her makeup all over her face. She loses that sophisticated exterior, and she gives herself over to this witchiness. Can you talk about that? 
When we see Lila in her power, it’s not about the clothes or the makeup. To me, she is a witch. She appears like a witch, but her power is, of course, something mysterious. Elena Ferrante said one time: “If I could catch the power and the mystery of Lila, I wouldn’t write My Brilliant Friend. Why I’m here to write is because I want to know where she is and what she is, and though I’ve spent all my life with Lila, I can’t put her in a box and say, ‘This is Lila.’�

It’s impossible to say what Lila is, so that’s why I speak about archetypes, because it’s not just a character. Yes, she’s tough. She’s fearless, of course, in a superficial way. But at the end, you can see the bottom, the inner work, the nature of Lila. Now she doesn’t give a shit about anything. Because she lost hope. She lost her life. So she becomes the poor child again. She’s once again angry with Elena. In this season, we see love between the two girls, yet she becomes angry, she returns to her nature. To me, she’s the queen of the shadows.

She is so elusive. Was it challenging for you, as an actor, to play a character who is always interpreted through someone else? We, the viewers and the readers, know everything Lenù is thinking — we’re inside her perspective and her head, and so Lila is also filtered through Lenù’s perspective. Does the fact that Lenù tells the story of Lila change how you interpret her? 
This is a point between the character and the actress, too. This is the first force to work on: Elena really tries to understand the mystery because she feels jealous of Lila’s way of being. And that’s why, for me, it’s very difficult to explain and speak about Lila in interviews, because I don’t want to say much. She needs to be mysterious.

My casting process was a hidden process. I worked on it for two years in my room with candles and music. Yes, I work as an actress, but at the same time, I work in a very spiritual way, because it’s very necessary to believe in something special. And if the actor or actress doesn’t believe, the audience won’t believe, right? The child actors are taught that when they play, it’s a very serious game.

I was going to ask if she felt like an enigma to you, but maybe you know her in ways we don’t. In that two-year period when you were preparing to play Lila, did you discover anything new about her that you hadn’t really thought of before? 
What I discovered that was very new to me was love for Elena. In this season, Lila is really empowered. She’s in touch with her body, her power, so she doesn’t have anything to lose, especially with Lenù. She doesn’t need to be recognized, or anything like that. In the beginning of the season, when she says to Lenù, “I have something hard to say to you about Nino,� for the first time, maybe, she’s sincere, which was a little bit new. This could be just because she’s become an adult — she’s a woman, so she can be a little bit more fragile with Lenù and her mother. In the scenes when Lenù and Lila discover they are pregnant, when I say, “I have something important to say to you: I’m pregnant too,� I saw the two children when they used to play with the dolls. The dolls are the new children that are coming. This kindness is new, and far from what we’d been in the habit of seeing Lila act like.