The Big Fake

Castellitto says we are all forgers now

Pietro Castellitto walked the Rome Film Festival carpet for The Big Fake and did not sell it as a dusty period piece. He sold it as a phone habit. "Today we see the lies on the phone. We live immersed in fake images, indistinguishable from real ones," he told Vanity Fair Italia. latestnetflix.com's view is that "The difference is that he, at least, knew why he was doing it."

The man is Antonio "Tony" Chichiarelli, the Roman painter credited with forged canvases and, more infamously, a Red Brigades communique. Director Stefano Lodovichi, born in 1983, said he wanted those Years of Lead without nostalgia and without picking a side. Sandro Petraglia, who found Nicola Biondo and Massimo Veneziani's book Il falsario di Stato more than a decade ago with producer Riccardo Tozzi, put it colder. Chichiarelli "was not a militant or an ideologue. He was an artist who turned his talent into a weapon, until it overwhelmed him."

A fake note that moved the army

Il Messaggero, the paper that took the real phone tip on the morning of 18 April 1978, still treats Communique No. 7 as unfinished business. The forged Red Brigades text claimed Aldo Moro had been killed and dumped in Lake Duchessa. Army and carabinieri moved. Who ordered Chichiarelli to write it, and why, remains an open Italian argument. TIME later walked the same paper trail for Netflix viewers and noted the film piles noir color onto a thin public record. ,

The same man is tied to the March 1984 Brink's Securmark vault job in Rome, the robbery Italian papers still call the heist of the century. The haul was reported at 35 billion lire. Chichiarelli claimed more than 50 billion. He was shot dead on 28 September 1984 at 36. His wife was wounded. No reconstruction of the ambush has ever been treated as certain.

The movie does not pretend to be a courtroom file. Festival notes and the English Wikipedia page flag it as a loose adaptation. Cattleya, part of ITV Studios, made it. Netflix dropped it on 23 January 2026 after the 19 October 2025 Rome premiere. The official trailer keeps circling one question. "To get where you want to go, what are you willing to do?" , ,

Then it charted

In the week of 19 to 25 January, Il Messaggero counted 3.1 million views. That was enough for second place on Netflix's Global Top Ten of non-English films, and the local Top Ten in 27 countries including Italy. The last Italian title to punch that high was The Tearsmith in April 2024. Castellitto plays Toni. Giulia Michelini, Andrea Arcangeli, Pierluigi Gigante, Aurora Giovinazzo, Edoardo Pesce, and Claudio Santamaria fill out a Rome of galleries, Magliana muscle, and a state fixer called the Tailor. ,

Castellitto, who also directs, said he likes being on a set he does not own. "I'll come back a better director." He also said something producers love and historians hate. "I have never met an unlikable criminal. What they share is vitality, a hunger for life. Toni is not an ideologue. He uses talent as a lockpick. He painted fake canvases and wrote a fake communique that changed history."

That is the gossip the film is actually selling. Not another Moro recap. A Netflix hit arguing that the forger's old trick is now the default setting of a feed.