The actor and director Marco Bocci was a guest at Le Iene on May 2: here he told himself in a touching monologue, speaking of his experience with an illness that struck him several years ago.
Marco Bocci: the disease due to a rare virus
“Four years ago I survived a rare virus. Part of the brain that governs memory and speech struck me, sending it haywire”: this is how Marco Bocci’s monologue begins, which immediately reveals the difficult, delicate and intimate theme that he will want to tell the public. For everyone, but even more so for an actor, memory is fundamental: with memory, actors not only live there, but work with it. That is why this illness was, and still is, a cause of great suffering for Bocci: “For a while I spoke a language of my own”, he reveals, “incomprehensible to others. If the ability to speak has returned, my memory and so many memories are gone forever.”
Illness and memory problems
“Today I don’t recognize the faces of friends, and it can even happen to watch a film six times before realizing that I had already seen it. I remember few anecdotes from my childhood, so much so that my friends call me ‘But who? But where ? But when?’ because I keep repeating these questions. I live with Google Maps because I don’t remember the streets of the towns around where I grew up and I had to learn to do my job in a new way, studying twice as much”. The actor talks about himself with an open heart, without hiding how painful this situation is: “I have often felt ignorant, limited, damaged, because the memories that we carry within us for a lifetime tell us who we are every day. So what about me, who I no longer have many of those memories or I do have them, but corrupted, mixed up with my imagination, who am I really? I’ve often asked myself this”, he confesses.
Marco Bocci: “Every day I am reborn”
Marco Bocci’s strength was in being able to find an opportunity, even in this terrible illness: “I stopped looking and I like to imagine that it was instead a stroke of luck, that in my past there was something that I absolutely had to forget. Today I have learned to live with this nuisance, indeed sometimes I take advantage of it and pretend not to remember things that I do remember very well”, he says ironically. Then he concludes, positively: “Every day I am reborn as a man who has left behind a piece of his past, to live in the present. A new man, and even if he may seem strange to you, a happy man”.
