'My Brilliant Friend' returns for final season with two new stars

Years ago, Irene Maiorino's best childhood friend handed her a book that would change the course of her life. It was Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend, the first volume in a quadrilogy that was made into a TV series by HBO and Italy's RAI. And now, the fourth and final season is available starting Monday on HBO's Max.

"This child is you, when you were a child," Maiorino recalled her friend Alessia saying about the novel's titular protagonist and sometimes antagonist Lila. Like Lila and her friend Lenù, Maiorino is from Naples and stayed in the south, while her friend left to study in the north of the country, get married and have children.

Art has now truly imitated life for Maiorino, who plays Lila in the fourth season of the series.

"Thanks to Lila, I found myself again because I was lost," Maiorino told NPR's Leila Fadel during a recent visit to New York with fellow cast members. "She was braver than me. She fights against privilege, and she gives me the strength to be the kind of woman I want to be."

Lila and Lenù, played by Alba Rohrwacher, reach middle age at this stage of an engrossing narrative that began in an impoverished Neapolitan neighborhood in post-war Italy.

They are mothers, falling in and out of marriage — and love. Like the three preceding ones, this season manages to translate the vivid and complex lives of female characters to the small screen.

It's an epic ode to love and freedom, first imagined in the Neapolitan Quartet, as Ferrante's novels are collectively known. The author — who has remained anonymous — has contributed to the series, communicating mainly via email with the directors.

"Ferrante's final book in the series was "like a Bible" for the production team. "When there was uncertainty about the staging, about where the character was at that point, reading the book always put us on the right path," Rohrwacher said on NPR's Morning Edition. Maiorino added that "Ferrante gave us always an answer, like a god."

'Arriving on dry land'

Playing Lenù for the first time on screen was a watershed moment for Rohrwacher, who has narrated the series since the first season, in 2018.

"Arriving at the point when my voice and my face unite, it was like arriving on a dry land after having made the journey through an ocean filled of emotions, fears, obstacles and unexpected discoveries," she said. "I felt very powerful to finally find my voice and my body together."

Rohrwacher's sister Alice, a leading Italian auteur in her own right, guest directed two episodes in the series' second season. The sisters collaborate regularly, with Alba appearing in several of Alice's films, including 2023's La Chimera.

This season of My Brilliant Friend is directed by Laura Bispuri, the only other instance in which the director was a woman — Saverio Costanzo directed the first two seasons and Daniele Luchetti the third one.

Exploring inner turmoil

The turbulent inner lives of the story's characters are mined in this season.

Lila on the outside appears as a powerful businesswoman. But there's a fragility in her private life that "revolves around her feelings for Enzo, who's a very positive character who has a completely different resonance compared to the other men that Lila has been involved with in the past," Maiorino said, speaking through an interpreter. Those other men have invariably lied, cheated, but mainly disappointed and even beat her.

Bold and fierce, Lila appears to be the "driving force" of Lenù, but she's also elusive, said Rohrwacher.

"Sometimes I imagine Lila as a ghost who has a project of Elena, who gave her the strength to emancipate herself from the reality in which she was born," mainly through studies and writing, she added.

But while playing the role of Lenù on set, Rohrwacher came to ask herself if the opposite might in fact be true. She points to a moment in the first season when the protagonists, as young girls, venture out of their neighborhood for the first time. While Lila instigates the adventure, she freezes out of fear as soon as they step outside their familiar area, while Lenù wants to keep walking toward the unknown.

Years later, Lenù ultimately escapes the reality of her neighborhood to travel to Florence, Pisa, Turin (Genoa in the novels), Paris and even New York, while Lila stays in Naples. "Elena is the epic, she goes horizontal, experiences life, moves all over," Rohrwacher said. "Lila is the tragic, she goes vertical. The journey of Lila is inside herself, like in a Greek tragedy."

Maiorino says this verticality of Lila's character has always impressed her. "I see her as a tree with strong roots," the actress added.

Lenù's journey is filled with adventures and struggles. She finally has a relationship with her childhood love, Nino, but this comes at the sacrifice of the stability provided by her marriage into the cultured and wealthy Airota family.

That all leads to avoidance. "Elena is trying to avoid Lila because Lila is the person who can tell the truth, and maybe Elena in this moment of her life doesn't want to face the truth," Rohrwacher said.

'Huge responsibility'

Many women have come to recognize themselves in Lila and Lenù. Both actresses spoke of the "huge responsibility" of portraying these characters who fight and overcome the difficult circumstances in which they were born. "Maybe some women through these characters found the way to state themselves in a man's world," Rohrwacher said.

Lila refuses to conform to society's expectations of marriage and submission to men. "I'd like to give back to the audience the enormous greatness of this kind of character," Maiorino said.

She added that Lila will likely remain by her side, like a friend, like a shadow. “But I’m not afraid of a shadow—without a shadow, we don’t have light.”

The broadcast version of this story was produced by Lilly Quiroz. The digital version was edited by Majd al-Waheidi.