"Non faccio questo mestiere mettendomi sul mercato come una merce" : note sull'attore cinematografico italiano e il suo contributo al cinema di interesse culturale.

This article investigates the role of the actor in contemporary Italian cultural interest film. It offers two lines of analysis. First, it examine the correlations between films financed by the Italian ministry, Mibact, for being “of cultural interest” and the various prizes won by the actors that appear in significant roles within those films during the 2004-2014 period. Second, it analyses the star-image of actors in quality cinema, following the developments provided by the recent evolution of celebrity and stardom studies in the Italian context, too. Its aim is to illustrate: 1) how certain actors can elude the judgment of the box office, which is typically used to evaluate the presence/performance of the star within the film industry; 2) how they can accumulate reputation capital, making them better placed to bring a kind of quality label to their films; and 3) how they define themselves in an oppositional (but also contradictory) way with respect to the standard modes of constructing stardom. It focuses in particular on the trajectories of two exemplary actors in the field of quality cinema, for reasons that are respectively made clear: Margherita Buy and Toni Servillo.