Last night I settled in to watch Julian Schnabel’s In the Hand of Dante, and there, somewhere in the flicker of it, was Franco Nero. And just like that, the years dropped away.
Suddenly I was ten years old again, in a cinema in Mexico City, the lights going down, the screen filling up with Camelot. I didn’t have the words for it then. I only knew that when Franco Nero appeared as Lancelot, something in me went perfectly still and perfectly loud at the same time. That dark gaze, that quiet intensity, the way he could hold a whole frame without seeming to try. I was a kid in the dark, and I think that was the exact moment I understood something true about myself — long before I had the vocabulary to name it. It wasn’t confusing. It felt, if anything, like a small, certain piece of news arriving from inside me. Oh. So that’s how it is. I was gay, and Lancelot had told me so.
There’s something tender about realizing, decades later, that a movie star you’ve never met handed you one of the first honest pieces of your own life. Not through anything he did or said, just by existing on a screen at the right moment, in the right light, in front of the right wide-eyed kid.
And what a career to have been the doorway. Franco Nero has spent a lifetime being magnetic — from Camelot onward, through film after film, decade after decade, somehow always recognizable and always surprising. To see him still working, still showing up in something as ambitious as a Schnabel picture, is its own kind of joy. The man simply does not stop being interesting to watch.
I never met him. I never will, most likely. And I’ve made my peace with that — there’s the old wisdom, isn’t there, about not trying to meet your heroes. Not because they’d disappoint you, but because some figures are better left exactly where they first reached you: up on the screen, larger than life, untouchable in the best way. The Lancelot of a ten-year-old’s heart doesn’t need a handshake to confirm him. He’s already done his work.
So thank you, Franco Nero. For the great roles, the long career, and most of all for one afternoon