Elena Ferrante's brilliant friend becomes a series: Naples is back on TV

Cover of the book The brilliant friend of Elena Ferrante

Elena Ferrante's highly successful books, the quadrilogy The brilliant friend, become an international TV series that will bring Naples back to the small screen!

Among the new TV series coming out in 2018 there will also be the one based on the novel by Elena Ferrante, "The brilliant friend", which has immediately become a best seller in recent years. It is a quadrilogy written by a 'author of Naples still considered very mysterious since it is believed that his is a pseudonym, even if it seems that the writer herself has denied it.

In any case, we do not know his identity with certainty, but surely we can say that the series of novels that has met with great success will become a TV series co-produced by HBO and RAI.

Television transposition will cover all books and shortly we will start shooting the story of the first of four, which also gives its name to the saga The brilliant friend, with the directed by Saverio Costanzo and the author's own supervision.

The brilliant friend: the literary case becomes a television series

The series dedicated to all books will be divided into four seasons of eight episodes each and it will be turned entirely in Italian. For the foreign market, especially the American one, there will be subtitles in English. It will turn in Naples and at the moment the date of airing is not yet known.

A very particular curiosity concerns the fact that not even the director Saverio Costanzo still knows the true identity Elena Ferrante and currently communicates with her only by email, but Ferrante has announced that she does not want to interfere with the work of the producers, declaring at the same time happy to read the texts and send her very detailed notes.

The plot of the television series

The series will remain faithful to the book, trying in any case to respect the ideas and the work of the author, but it must also be attractive to an international audience. Therefore, we will try to be as faithful as possible to the plot, given the fact that the television transposition uses different means compared to a written text.

Regarding the history of the book, the two protagonists are the two friends Elena and Raffaella, also called Lenù and Lila, who live in a run-down neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples. The narration goes on according to Elena's point of view, until the girls' adolescence, a period in which life leads her to get away because of the different economic conditions of the two families. But over time, their respective experiences, above all sentimental, will bring them closer together.

The protagonists actors

The actors who will play the protagonists, especially the two girls Elena and Raffaella, have not yet been chosen, but Ferrante stated that it would be better to choose two amateurs. The reason lies in the fact that children who are not professional actors can more easily get out of a stereotype that could sew adults on them when they interact, instead, with professional actors.

Meanwhile, the first castings are taking place at the Rione Sanità between amateur daughters of 8 and 15 years.

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Written by Fabiana Bianchi
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