FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions

How is your name pronounced? Lookaah

When is your birthday? Aug 7th 1974

How tall are you? 6.2

What is your eye color? Green

Are you married or single? Single 

*please see second question and do the math... : )

What was your first acting job? Italian TV Show named "Distretto Di Polizia" where I played a drug addict

Do you have any hobbies and if so, what are they? I'm a ski, and Yoga fanatic. Spending time with my friends and cooking for them in my loft is my favorite thing to do.

Where do you see yourself in ten years? I see myself a bit more settled, I want kids cause I grew up in a big family being the 2nd of four... I wouldn't know where but I'd love to give my kids the chance of growing up in both Europe and US.

Do you have any pets? Yes I have a big Husky Dog in Italy his name is Wally...

What is your favorite...

Color: Green

Music: Tough question... I listen to everything from R&B to Electronica... Some names, Mirways, Coldplay, REM, Madonna, Missy Elliot, as I said everything

Actors/Actresses:

Actor... Johnny Depp Cause I always liked his choices, from the way he picks a part to the way he plays it, so unconventional... brilliant.

Actress....Julia Roberts I know I know I should have come up with somebody more intense but taking nothing away from the great leading ladies from the past and present... I simply lose my mind when I see Julia Roberts. I'll see her movies in the theatre at least a couple of times...

Movie: So many good ones...

Recent- Moulin Rouge

Dated- Who's afraid of Virginia Wolf

Television Show: Friends, Will and Grace.. Cannot live without those...

 

*Do you have a question for Luca? If so, please write us at: askluca@lucacalvani.com

 

Introducing...Luca Calvani

(courtesy of soapcity.com)

Designing Man
I was born in Italy. I was raised there. I came to New York when I was 19. I came over to work in the textile business. I'm a textile engineer with a specialization in marketing and I came out to work for a textile company which was doing business development with different companies like DKNY, the French Connection, and Banana Republic.

New York, New York, it's a Heck of a Town
In New York, you get exposed to a certain group of people that you would never get exposed to in Italy. Coming from Florence, nobody's an actor that I knew growing up. This is not really a career. But, I didn't grow up wanting to be an actor. I grew up wanting to be in New York. I was four, they said, what do you want to do? I said, "Live in New York." I didn't know what I would be doing, I just wanted to live in New York. And here, you get exposed to the art circle of people, and it's something that I became interested in and wanted to check out. I audited a few classes and it became clear to me that that's really what I wanted to do. It was like, oh my God, I really want to do this. And being in another business allowed me to.

Color Scheme
To me, the job I used to do came pretty easy, and acting was a challenge. I've always been known to really push myself. Most of the people I went to school with now, at my age, still live with their parents. And to me, it was really about settling myself. I wanted to live in New York, and I wanted to live in SoHo. So, I took a really raw space, like a warehouse, and I fixed it all up myself -- from putting up walls to doing all the wiring, and I put in a kitchen. I worked a lot and hard. And I think I needed that because when I came to New York, my mom had passed away. She was very young. She was 45. She died in an accident. She was in interior design, and so I wanted to do a little bit of what she did. I needed a place that I could be busy on so I didn't really have to deal with that. It kept me busy so I didn't have the time to really get depressed. I always had a project. I always had a wall to paint. I always had a wall to put up. And it made me find myself. I guess when something like that happens to you at such an age -- and I was in New York when it happened. I was in New York for business, and I was here for a couple of months and that's when it happened. I went back to Italy for two months, and I knew when I came back here it was going to be a big change. I wanted to make a big change, and I wanted to set a new standard for what I wanted to do.

Lofty Ambitions
Luckily, I had some money put away so I could take off six months and see if acting was really what I wanted to do. And of course when I realized that that's really what I wanted to do, the whole thing changed. I started bell hopping at a hotel and I started doing the whole actor thing. I gave up a lot, in a way. Definitely the life style. I had to rent out one of the rooms in my loft!

Fearless
I read this book. It's about an Italian kid who isolated himself, who locked himself in a trailer parked outside of his family's house because he wanted to write, because he couldn't deal with the beauty of the world. And I thought, well, I guess my trailer's just a little bit bigger, and it's called New York. I wanted to separate myself from everything. My hometown, which is actually four miles north of Florence, it's a one-industry town. Everybody's in textiles. My dad has a textile mill. Everybody knows everybody because of their family business. So, definitely, when my mom passed away there was a stereotype. I didn't want to be that. I didn't want to be the guy who's mom died in a really horrible accident. It made me more fearless. I just realized that I should have done what I wanted to do because life is short and you don't really know what's going to happen next. As far as acting, I didn't know anything about it. Everyone in my class was so intense and they've done this and that, and I kind of walked into this room a month into the class. The class had already started, so everybody already knew each other, and I was just like, "Oh s---."

Head of the Class
Ron Stetson is an incredible acting coach. He wasn't afraid to say, "That sucked." The first year of the program, there were ten of us. The second year only five of us got invited back. So, it was definitely kind of intense. I'm a go-getter. I've bypassed a lot of tests in life because I definitely have a confidence that I exuded when I was in business. Even though I was a 23 year old, I ran a business, and I had people working for me who were in their fifties. So I knew how to deal with that. I was confident after what I'd done in business to start all over again and be the idiot of the town. Because where I was in Ron's class, I really didn't know my a-- from a hole in the wall. And for two years, Ron never really gave me a break. Until the last day of my classes. He said to me, "You're the smartest actor I've ever met. Just go out there and get a career. You don't need to go study with anyone anywhere else because I'm telling you, you can act. Now, just go out there and get it." It was quite a stunning revelation for me, so I went out there and tried to make it happen.

Do You Speak Acting?
It's really hard in America to put yourself out there, being Italian. When I came to New York, I didn't speak English. I had somebody translate everything. To me, English sounded just like a noise. I remember my first few days in acting class where we did all these exercises recognizing behavior. I didn't know half of those words, like bewildered or sulking. I would go home and look them up in the dictionary. My friend, Rhonda, she's the head of product development at Victoria's Secret. She's a big corporate fashion woman. When I first decided to act she sat me down and said, "Luca, you want to become an actor? I don't even understand half the things you say!" That was two years ago, before I took speech and diction and all that.

Sex and the Single Guy
I went to Italy last year, and by chance I got a big film out there that turned out to be the biggest film in Italy this year. It's called The Blind Fairies. It's going to be released out here in the fall. And it went to Berlin for the festival. Have you heard of Steam? Same director. So I did that. And two weeks later an audition for Sex in the City came along, and that was incredible. It was such a great experience for me to work with Alan Cummings, and with Sarah Jessica (Parker) and Kim Cattrall, and to work with Michael Patrick King, an incredible writer and director. I love all of his work. I knew Michael Patrick for his work developing Will and Grace and writing the entire first season of Sex in the City, which is a really fun show. Afterwards, I went to Italy to shoot a TV show and then came back to New York for the première of my Sex in the City episode, and then a week later, (ATWT Casting Director) Jimmy Bohr called me in.

Forget Me Not
I went in, and it was like Dead Man Walking . At World Turns, they use the rehearsal hall for auditions, which if you walk up the stairs, it's this long hallway, and it's all grey, and I only saw the chair at the end of the hall. The door was open, and the chair was facing to the left, and I walk in and there are like 12 people sitting down, and I'm like, "Oh s---, this is it." My first audition I thought I did great. My second audition I completely forgot my lines -- all of them. And I just made it up. I remember the assistant in casting, she's walking me out and she's just like, "You did great, you made all of that up, didn't you?" And I was like, "Yeah, I didn't remember anything!" And she's like, "I think you'll be fine." And actually, by the time I walked out of the building, I was walking back to the F train on Ave. M, my agent called me and said, "You got it!" And I was on this block in Brooklyn, and I wanted to hug someone.

Getting to Know You
I started taping two weeks ago with Martha (Byrne), who is incredible. It's kind of interesting to play an evil person. I'm the kind of guy who sets bugs free. I don't even smash them. I pick them up and I set them free out the window. And my first day on the show, they had me try to strangle Martha Byrne. And I'm like "Congratulations on your Emmy, I'm going to choke you now." It was like, could you put a little bit less pressure on me? Could I not try to strangle an award-winning actress on the first day of work, please? And I had stunts to do. I had to jump out of this opera box. I got to deal with a gun for the first time in my life. That's what I like about soaps. It's crash therapy. You do it, and they go, "Oh, this is perfect." And I was just like, "I only did it once. Can we do it once more, please? Let's do it one more time just to make sure it's okay." In film we'd get to do half a page a day, and then to work on a soap where you get to run 70 pages a day. Today I'm taping 35 pages of dialogue all on my own. I'm the most talkative villain on daytime. But, what's great about TV is you get to work with a group of people who have worked together for a long time, so you feel like you're really a guest in a family. And the way they work together and the professionalism that I've seen on As The World Turns is truly inspiring. To see these people everyday going in there and making it happen. It's quite a miracle I think.