Checco Zalone
Luca Pasquale Medici was a cabaret comic, singer and musician before he was a film star, and the distance between those jobs has never been very wide for him. He co-writes his own vehicles and plays the same figure in all of them, a boorish, guileless southern Italian everyman called Checco Zalone. In the 2009 debut the character still carries the actor's own name, Luca Medici; by the 2016 film released in English as Where Am I Going?, the persona had swallowed the man, and the credit simply reads Checco.
The films arrive at a steady clip: 2009, 2011, 2013, 2016, 2020, and then Buen Camino in 2025, which became the highest-grossing film in Italy. That is a scale of domestic success most countries reserve for imported blockbusters, and it has never converted into fame abroad, which is the usual fate of comedy built on a national accent and a very local kind of embarrassment.
What keeps the run from going stale is that he does not flood the market. Six films across sixteen years, each one co-written, each one built around the same character, is closer to how a stand-up tours a new hour than to how a film star works.
Movies (4)
Where to start with Checco Zalone
Start with Where Am I Going?, the 2016 hit that turned the Checco persona into a national institution and the film most likely to have been subtitled wherever you are. Then double back to Cado dalle nubi from 2009, where the persona is rougher and the character still carries the actor's real name; in that order you can see exactly what got sanded down and what got sharpened. Buen Camino is the 2025 entry and the biggest earner of the lot, useful for judging whether the formula has held or merely grown. We Are Cinema uses archive footage of him rather than a performance, so treat it as background rather than a place to begin.