Edoardo Ballerini
Edoardo Ballerini is an actor, born 1970.
Two careers run side by side on this page, and only one of them is visible on screen. Edoardo Ballerini, born in Los Angeles in 1970, is a working character actor, and he is also one of the most in demand audiobook narrators in English, twice honoured as Best Male Narrator by the Audio Publishers Association for readings of Jess Walter's Beautiful Ruins and Dean Koontz's Watchers. He later co-wrote the story The Angel of Rome with Walter.
The screen work is character work, mostly in New York registers. The role most people cite is the hotheaded chef in Dinner Rush, a restaurant picture where the kitchen hierarchy is the plot and Ballerini plays the man convinced the menu is his and nobody else's. The Sopranos gave him the junkie Corky Caporale, and that series is not among the credits listed here.
Around those two, a long spread of one and two episode parts and second tier film roles: Victor in The Last Days of Disco, Vincent Roth in Romeo Must Die, Paul Hollander in Experimenter, Karl in Quarry, Timms in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and more recently Ray in A Murder at the End of the World. He directs as well: his debut feature, Good Night Valentino, premiered at Sundance in 2003.
The result is a rare career shape. He is recognised more by ear than by face, and the body of work with his name at the top of it is one you listen to.
Movies (7)
TV (5)
Where to start with Edoardo Ballerini
Start with Dinner Rush. It is the film here built to his strengths, a single night in one restaurant where everyone talks over everyone, and Ballerini plays the chef with enough genuine arrogance that you understand why the kitchen resents him.
After that the pattern is guest work done properly. Experimenter drops him into a stylised period piece about an infamous psychology study; A Murder at the End of the World uses him as texture inside a very controlled ensemble; Quarry is the best looking television around him. Romeo Must Die and The Last Days of Disco are worth a look mainly to see how early he was already doing this exact thing.
If you want the work he is genuinely best known for, put the remote down. The narration is where the real body of work sits.