Neva Leoncini is a Florentine actress, opera singer and storyteller based in Los Angeles where she works in international theater and cinema productions.
Until the spring of 2022, Neva Leoncini was an opera singer with a career that began as a soprano in Florence, where she sang both for the Florence Opera Academy – under the guidance of sopranos of the calibre of Silvia Bossa and Susanna Rigacci – and in musicals including Rocky Horror Show, Hair, Les Misérables and the Capodanno Mozartiano festival. Neva studied theatre at the Pergola and under the guidance of Maurizio Lombardi (the man who recognised her acting talent, taking her into his company when she was just 19 years old) she performed in musical fairy tales for years such as Peter Pan or Snow White. In our city, she performed in theatres such as the Pergola, Verdi, Puccini, Niccolini and historical venues such as Loggia dei Lanzi or Salone dei Cinquecento, to name but a few.
Then a bureaucratic matter – having to travel to Los Angeles to sign the documents for the sale of her Californian grandmother’s childhood home – marked a turning point in her life. Taking the opportunity to enrol in acting courses at the University of South California, University of California Los Angeles and the Victory Theatre in Burbank, she is now an up-and-coming actress who has already acted in 10 productions, including short films, pilots and a music video.
Films include Doubling (2023) to be directed by Vincent Peter Mocco – the first film she has starred in with Truman Hanks (Tom Hanks’ son, Ed.) – and Paranoid by renowned Chinese director Junda Wu. The latter is a short film in the official selection of the important LA Shorts International Film Festival. FUL wanted to get to know Neva better, sure that the general public will soon discover her too!
You had an early career as an opera singer in Florence; tell us how you ended up in Los Angeles as an actress.
Music has always been my muse. The first contact with the art world I have memory of is of a little me in the back of my father’s car, driving around Florence, trying to improvise on Ennio Morricone’s soundtrack to Sergio Leone’s film Giù la testa. Cinema, theatre and classical music have accompanied me and been interchangeable entities for me for as long as I can remember, one cannot exist apart from the other. Whenever I have to interpret a character musically I feel the need to do an acting preparation that comes from pure theatre and vice versa: when I work on a theatre or film character I always resort to music for the most intense moments.
Florence saw me born and supported me in my growth, but life sometimes surprises you, in fact I would almost always say it has plans for you that you did not even suspect existed. With me it did so! It was the beginning of 2022 when my grandmother Neva – that’s where I got my name from, yes! – who lives in Rome and is American, called me to tell me that I needed to go and sign some documents on her behalf for the sale of her childhood home in Los Angeles.
I booked a one-way ticket and stayed three months. Theatres, cinemas, boundless landscapes, the desert, the ocean, but above all the people: young talents from all over the world with a dream to realise and a will to live like I had never seen before. It was done, California had bewitched and fascinated me so much that I returned to Italy ready to leave for the USA the next day!
In Los Angeles I had the idea of perfecting my opera singing when a friend, a casting director, dragged me to one of the most historic studios for Meisner technique, the Victory Theatre, saying that I absolutely had to meet the artistic director Maria Gobetti.
She looked at me, without saying a word, with the grimace of someone who knows it all, and got me on stage. I can say that one of the first reasons I left Florence and moved there was for the studio where I still work and prepare shows. They won’t get rid of me easily!
Although the Florentine artistic community is remarkable, Florence can also be very provincial. What did you find in Los Angeles that you missed in Italy?
Florence saw me born as a musician, cradled and nurtured me as an artist, taught me a taste for beauty and made me breathe an international air in its polyglot and culturally ever-living atmosphere. It has taught me that the more you tease each other, the more you love each other, given me a love of art and culture that I have filled myself with in its quiet, narrow alleys at night and in its country houses or trattorias in the evening. Los Angeles is another world, from the outside I could describe it as a series of small conurbations with lots of palm trees and lots of sunshine, interspersed with a seven-lane highway.
But as soon as you step inside you begin to breathe in the atmosphere of a city that has seen the greatest Hollywood movie stars of all time, the most phenomenal musical artists, born, succeed and die.
It is a place that makes people. Los Angeles cannot exist without its people. Young and old, coming from all corners of the world with a dream, an ideal, a drive and a hunger I have never seen anywhere else. They have fought and struggled to get where they are, because no, it is not easy. And now that they have made it, they want to stay, and they grit their teeth every day to emerge and create, to tell their story, to share their vision with the world: Los Angeles is teeming with these lives, with stories, with tales. You walk into a bar, strike up a conversation with the man next to you, and end up working on the production of his next feature film.
You’re at an acting class, they invite a casting director and the next week you’re auditioning for his agency. And all this is true because it happens all the time and it happened to me! It’s a place that never sleeps, where every moment is precious because you never know what might happen.
I know you have a degree in linguistics. Can you tell me about the connections between studying languages, singing and acting?
There is no difference for me. I approach opera with the same discipline with which I learn a new language or study a character for my next film. I speak six languages and each time the challenge of learning remains the same: attention to detail is the secret for me; specificity in every single choice. Just as learning a new word or verb tense requires surgeon-like precision, a character’s movements reflect their choices and therefore their personality. The same goes for opera, where if you misplace a muscle in the larynx, or breathe too much or too little, the note will not come out. Also, languages are sounds, so you just close your eyes and repeat like a child.
What are the differences between singing on stage and in front of a camera?
There are so many! They are two different and almost technically opposite forms of artistic expression. In singing, everything is ‘out there’ and ‘projected’ because the goal is to reach the back row of the gallery, the feelings expressed through acting are greater than how you interact in reality and the reactions are more accentuated and extreme. On the contrary, the camera perceives everything, every tiny detail, every movement, every tilt of the voice. It captures every fragment. Everything is internalised and, as Michael Caine says: ‘You act with your eyes’, you just have to think it and the camera will capture it.
You are also a storyteller; how important is writing to you? And what do you think about the use of artificial intelligence in the creative industries and the recent strikes by screenwriters in Hollywood?
Being a storyteller is the inevitable destiny of all artistic expression. For me, writing is an integral part of the artistic process of creation. I have always written for myself, the difference now is that I do it with the idea of sharing my stories. I am currently co-writing my first short film, inspired by a story of love and immigration in the Italian-American community in the 1990s. We’ll see where it takes me. As for AI, I believe that the world is changing so fast and that our generation is already inevitably part of that change, and that art in general has always had a sinusoidal trend of recession, growth, development.
If you ask me where on the sine wave we are now, well, I can’t answer that, only history will tell us when we look back in fifteen or twenty years. I have supported the strikes since they started. I have been to the demonstrations in Hollywood, but it is not just about artificial intelligence, there are many aspects of the industry that need to be reviewed and for which we must continue to fight.
You were a guest at the 77th Cannes Film Festival and attended the screening of Sean Baker’s Anora, which went on to win the Palme d’Or. This year the festival wanted to reward more independent and committed productions, should we take that as a good sign?
Definitely. We are in a delicate historical moment for the creative industries, for art, culture and geopolitics in general. There is a sense that people are tired of the politics of ‘everything is great’ positivism. What we want from cinema is ‘truth’. We want to sit and be enveloped by the real, not the embellished. I feel that we are in a historical moment of great change, in which art is becoming the protagonist: people are not looking for comfort, but for confrontation and truth, in a perspective that may not caress and protect you, but does not make you feel alone.
cover photo: Neva Leoncini by ©Irene Montini
