Exclusive interview with Rico Simonini Italian-American actor, Producer and Writer

By Jean-Paul Eliard
06 August 2025

Hi Rico, I am very happy to do this interview. 
 

Could you introduce yourself to the visitors ?      
Bonjour. feel free to watch the above videos on YouTube for background or any of several YouTube videos under Rico Simonini including 3 appearances on michael Madsens podcast , American Badass. 

I am Rico Simonini , an artist, writer, poet , actor , scientist , educator and cardiologist   
I was probably born either 500 years too late or too early to be appreciated as being simply a humanist, actively curious about the nature of man -physical corporeal spiritual emotional and I suppose political.
Thus I’ve always sought to be a provocateur—through science , medicine , and art (stage screen or script ). 
I was born in NYC to Italian parents (one legal one not ). 
My father descended from Northern Italian and Corsican and my mother from the Greeks who settled in Naples and an ancestor who was recently canonized a Saint by the late pope Francis. 
I grew up on the stage known as Brooklyn USA where on every corner a star is born only to have it fall from the sky when you turned the next corner but then you got to make a wish as a consolation.
Men walking on the moon was the first thing to capture my imagination and made me curious about science (all science). 
Although the dream of leaving foot prints on the sea of tranquility was shattered at age 7 when I required eyeglasses , disqualifying me forever from astronaut training, my proclivities toward science eventually led to medicine. 
Around the same time my mother drowned her sorrows of her broken dream of having a normal marriage by watching old B& W classic films to which I’d join and watch the works of Bogart, Cagney, Stanwick, Mitchum , Brando thus planting the seeds to become an actor as well. 
 

What do you like when you read the script? 

Well , being as I wrote it, I think it was a good work in progress that realized  a critical moment in Frank’s career and the turning point of his life
 

And what did you think when you discovered your character Frank Sinatra?
 I played him honestly from the heart and  soul for after all he was man, a father, a husband who had found something he was willing to sacrifice everything for.  
 
In the movie it is your voice when there are songs or the voice of Frank Sinatra?
 That’s a secret.  
 

Can you tell us how you got your role?
 I starred in the theatre  production that preceded the film by 5 years.
Playwright Willard Manus developed the stage play Frank and Ava at the Actors Studio and brought me on board as “a perfect fit “ for the role  
 

how was the shooting with Michael Madsen, Harry Dean Stanton, Emily Elicia Low............ and directors Michael Oblowitz and Giorgos Papatheodorou ?

Overall it was the most rewarding hard work I have ever done and it was more arduous than writing a and obtaining a research grant , more political than lobbying for approval of new medicines from the FDA and treacherous as sailing a wooden caravel across the Atlantic Ocean with only your wits and your stars. 

The experiences with each actor , location , and even prop (like a 1949 DC3 airplane) were stories within stories portraying the perfect storm of events or just Vegas casino  luck.  
 

Do you watch yourself during the broadcast?
I try not to watch myself if I can help it

When and why did you choose to become an actor? Is it a film, an actor..........?
 It chose me. I was asked to do theatre countless time and may grafsm
 

Thank you very much for your interview Rico, I wish you the best.

More information about Rico can be found, on www.ricosimonini.com, on Instagram, on Youtube and on IMDb. 

To read more on
Noto Press and SounDarts.gr