I play Malena, a woman who stirs up the passions of a group of adolescent boys and arouses the jealousies of the local women in a town in forties Sicily.
I come from a small village in Italy, so I understand what it's like to be an attractive woman like her in such a place - where everybody knows everybody - where you walk down the street and men look at you and women are jealous of you.
Envy is human nature. This film is not just a portrait of a Sicilian village, or of beauty - it's about envy and how it can destroy relations between human beings. In this case it was beauty, but it could've been anything else.
I feel fine and comfortable with myself. I know many beautiful people and their lives are terrible - they are so uncomfortable with themselves. Being comfortable is not about what you look like, but how you feel. I'm a lucky person, because I've been loved a lot. I have a great family.
I have few words in the film and the idea of this was a challenge. I wanted to see if I could make this part exist just by using my body. There are so many things that came out of Malena. I learned how a body could speak. Acting is not just words.
Holly Hunter in The Piano - she didn't speak and she won an Oscar. It's too hard to say if it's a film I would've wanted to direct. It's a film that Giuseppe Tornatore wanted to direct. I just contributed a performance.
