Nia BowersAfter award-winning work in Chop Chop, a new festival selection for Mon Amour, and a completed supporting role in The Favorite: Dad’s Fights for Faith, the French actress with Italian roots is building a screen career through preparation, specificity, and cross-cultural storytelling.
Before filming Chop Chop, Clelia De Laurentiis made a choice that might have seemed strange to someone not in the business. At the table read, she brought an animal exercise into her preparation and chose a giraffe. The night before shooting, she studied documentary footage, watching the way giraffes held their necks, shifted their weight, and carried themselves through space.
The point was not to imitate an animal. It was to find a physical way into a human character.
“I was not trying to make the audience see a giraffe,” De Laurentiis says. “I was trying to understand what that physical quality could unlock in the person I was playing.”
De Laurentiis believes in turning technique into something usable on camera. The exercise had to disappear into the performance. It had to create a person, not call attention to the preparation behind her. According to feedback she received from the director, when she arrived on set the next day, it did not look like an actor showing an exercise. It looked as if a different person had stepped in to play the part.
That kind of concrete preparation has become part of how De Laurentiis is building her career. She is a French actress from an Italian family, trained in Los Angeles and already working across languages, accents, cultural references, and different kinds of screen projects. Her credits include the lead role in Chop Chop, the lead role in Italian Goodbye, the female lead in Mon Amour, and a major supporting role in The Favorite: Dad’s Fights for Faith, which has completed filming and is now in post-production.
The momentum around Chop Chop gave her early work a meaningful marker. In November 2024, De Laurentiis received the Best Actress award at the 3×5 Film Festival for her lead performance. The film also won Best Screenplay and Best of the Festival, then continued to selections at the Dark Matter Film Festival in 2025 and the Jagran Film Festival.
The recognition was not accidental to her process. Chop Chop asked for control, timing, and emotional availability inside an unconventional story. In one scene, De Laurentiis had to cry unassisted on a tight schedule. She stepped away, did her own private preparation, returned, and delivered the take in one go.
“That moment was not about forcing emotion,” she says. “It was about creating the conditions where I could be honest when the camera was ready.”
De Laurentiis is not only interested in taking roles seriously. She is interested in what happens before the take, when a choice has to be specific enough to survive the pressure of set.
Her training helped build that discipline. After moving from France to Los Angeles at 18, De Laurentiis studied theatre at Santa Monica College before entering the Associate of Occupational Studies degree program at the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute. Over two years of full-time training, she studied Method Acting, voice and movement, history, production, film fighting, and professional development. During her final year, she received a scholarship recognizing her commitment, discipline, and artistic growth.
For De Laurentiis, Method training is not a label to place on a résumé. It is a working system. It gives her tools for script analysis, physical behavior, emotional preparation, and the ability to make a role feel personal without losing control of the scene.
“Training gave me a structure,” she says. “It taught me how to prepare deeply and still stay available to what happens in the moment.”
That availability is becoming more visible as her opportunities expand. In Italian Goodbye, De Laurentiis found a project that connected directly to her family background. She is French, but she comes from an Italian family, and that gave the role a personal charge.
“When I read the script for Italian Goodbye, I immediately felt that my Italian roots gave me something specific to bring to the story,” she says. “It felt personal in a way I did not want to ignore.”
The film has been selected by The Great Film Club in Los Angeles in 2025, adding another point to a growing filmography built through festival-selected work.
Her work in Mon Amour adds another example of how specific preparation shows up in her performances. The short film has been officially selected for Follow Your Heart NY. The film follows an effortlessly egotistical middle-aged playwright and his young French actress wife as they spiral into a grotesque argument over the new play they are working on together.
De Laurentiis stars as the female lead, portraying the young French actress wife. The role required a particular kind of technical reversal. After previously working with an accent coach to develop a more neutral English accent for her acting work, she had to do the opposite for Mon Amour. Director Keyur Gaikwad specifically asked her to perform in English with a strong French accent, which meant intentionally bringing that accent forward while keeping the character authentic.
“For Mon Amour, I had to use something I had trained myself to soften,” De Laurentiis says. “The challenge was to let the French accent be present without making it feel like an idea of a French woman. It still had to feel like a real person speaking from a real emotional place.”
That kind of adjustment points to the larger range she is building. In one project, her preparation may begin with physical research. In another, it may come through family roots, language, or accent. The through-line is the same: De Laurentiis looks for the specific demand of the role, then builds from there.
Her next major step moves into feature filmmaking. De Laurentiis recently completed filming The Favorite: Dad’s Fights for Faith, where she plays Annie, a nurse, in a major supporting role. The film stars Charlene Amoia and Antonio Sabato Jr. and is now in post-production.
For De Laurentiis, the project carried meaning beyond the professional milestone.
“Working on a faith-based film touched me deeply, especially because it is based on a true story,” she says. “With everything happening in the world right now, it feels meaningful to create art about faith, in the hope that it can help people.”
That sense of connection influences the choices she is making now. De Laurentiis is building a career across independent film, festival-recognized projects, and larger feature opportunities. She has also worked in French-language voice-over commercials and on-camera modeling, which have strengthened her control of presence, rhythm, and nonverbal communication.
Her path is international by nature. She left France for Los Angeles, trained in English, works across cultural contexts, and brings both French and Italian identity into the way she embodies material. For an actor, that background affects the emotional access point into a story, the rhythm of a character, and the lived understanding brought into the frame.
Clelia De Laurentiis is not simply building toward international film opportunities. She is showing, role by role, how much preparation it takes to be ready for them.