Poker Face, a thriller written, directed and starring Oscar-winning actor Russel Crowe, has its world premiere on day five of the seventeenth edition of the Rome Film Fest, today October 17. The famous actor, known worldwide for having starred in leading films of the international film industry, presents the film which sees him for the second time behind the camera.
As we said Poker Face marks the great return to the management of Russell Crowe who, 8 years after his debut with The Water Diviner, decides to immerse himself in this adventure or rather in this case in this great and difficult challenge. The star of Il Gladiatore, in fact, as we will discover later, will face the project with decidedly more difficulty than the previous one. In the film, the actor, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Stephen M. Coates, plays protagonist and gambler Jake Foley. To complete the cast, as well as Crowe, we also find Liam Hemsworth who plays Alex, Elsa Pataki who is Jake’s wife and rapper RZA Drew. The film will be distributed by Vertice 360 in all Italian cinemas from Thursday 24 November.
Photo credit: Brook Rushton
Poker face synopsis
Jake Foley, a player by profession, becomes over time a billionaire thanks to the passion he had in his childhood, poker. Indeed, he lives with his second wife and daughter in a sumptuous villa in the city of Miami. Her seemingly perfect life, however, hides an important secret that you have never told anyone, not even her family. And this secret will one day make him want to reunite his four historical friends to play poker as before. This time around, however, the stakes are very high Jake, in fact, offering them the chance to win more money than they ever dreamed of.
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A high-risk encounter that actually hides an ulterior motive, namely that of forcing his former playmates to confess something that they have carefully hidden all their lives. To interrupt the evening, three criminals broke into the house, one of whom had had an unfinished business with the owner for some time. This unexpected event will upset Foley’s initial intentions and lead the inseparable group of yesteryear to reunite to resist this aggression.
The film based on the experience of Russell Crowe: “everything I have done in my career is part of the film”
Following the first preview of Poker Face which took place on November 16 at the Auditorium Parco della Musica in Rome, Russell Crowe was called to present his second film as a director during a press conference. The aspect that struck a lot during the meeting was his incredible sincerity in telling the film. In fact, the actor appeared without any type of filter, managing to turn even some moments of extreme gravity into funny sketches. He begins by saying: “Poker Face was a production that was already financed when it was offered to me for the first time. The person who was to ensure the realization had unfortunately had family problems and had to abandon the project five weeks after the start of filming. They called me: and they said ‘it’s just a little time to start filming, the script is a mess, there is no director. Do you want to take care of it?”
Poker Face press conference
At this point, Crowe saw fit to contextualize the timing of this proposal: “I had just lost my father. We were in the middle of a pandemic. Sydney was about to enter one of the toughest lockdowns ever. What I did, then, was follow the principle that my father would apply. I had before me 280 crew members who without me would have been unemployed in this difficult situation. I have worked in film and television since the age of 6. The vast majority of my friends are people of this world. This got me thinking: leave 280 families at home? At that point, I decided to accept. In retrospect, that seems like the craziest choice I’ve ever made. I immediately got to work and all my experience, everything I did in my career helped me and became part of the film. A difficult situation which, as the director says, transformed a film that was supposed to be action into a film that speaks of a legacy, “of a man who has everything but time”.