Rocco Siffredi To Play ‘Disturbing’ Role In Non-Porn Horror Flick

Italian star Rocco Siffredi, one of the world’s best-known porn performers, will open up his Budapest-based Rocco Siffredi Academy for the filming of a non-porn horror movie, which will begin lensing sometime in 2020. Siffredi himself will undertake a rare acting role outside of porn in the upcoming film. According to a report in the entertainment trade “bible” Variety, Siffredi will take the role of  “a mysterious and disturbing character”—but one supposedly based on “who he is in real life.” To be titled Red Academy, the film would seem to offer an odd type of publicity for Siffredi’s “university of porn.” Variety describes the plot as involving “two best friends named Ricky and Eve” who decide to “spice up” a European vacation by taking a detour to Hungary, so they can drop in on the Siffredi Academy.  But their detour turns out to be ill-advised, as their visit to Siffredi’s porn school quickly devolves into “a shocking journey,” and the academy itself is portrayed as an “underground world where mystical rituals mix with faith... [and] domination melts into adoration and violence.” At least, that’s how the film’s advance promotional materials describe it, as quoted by Variety. The film is set to be directed by Italian horror veteran Alessio Liguori, whose most recent film, In The Trap, had a more mundane setting than Red Academy. Namely, the film dealt with “a solitary proof reader [who] is trapped in his apartment, too afraid to leave and tortured by an unknown evil force,” according to a description posted via the Internet Movie Database. Though Siffredi is of course best known for appearing in hundreds of hardcore porn scenes, the upcoming horror flick will not be his first stab at traditional dramatic acting. The star has previously acted in French director Catherine Breillat’s art films Romance and Anatomy of Hell. Siffredi was also the subject of the 2016 documentary Rocco, and has appeared in several commercials on Italian television. Photo By Glenn Francis / Wikimedia Commons