Great expectations
Ahead of the launch of sweeping Greek melodrama The Great Chimera, star Fotinì Peluso and director Vardis Marinakis reveal how they collaborated on this adaptation of M Karagatsis’s celebrated novel about a complex heroine caught up in a turbulent love triangle.
Described as a modern classic, The Great Chimera by Greek author M Karagatsis is a novel that explores desire, devotion and identity to tell the story of a young woman caught between her own passion and social expectations.
Now, a six-part series filmed across the Greek island of Syros, the capital Athens and the Italian city of Trieste brings this tragic 1930s love story to the screen for the first time.
The cast is led by rising Italian star Fotinì Peluso (Everything Calls for Salvation), who plays the restless Marina. Eager to flee her troubled family past in Trieste and obsessed with classical Greek culture, Marina falls in love with Greek sea captain Yannis and follows him to the sun-drenched island of Syros to begin a new life in the home of her distrustful mother-in-law.
As Yannis (Andreas Konstantinou) strives to build a shipping empire with her financial support, Marina enjoys her new life. But she is soon charmed by Yannis’s younger brother Minas (Dimitris Kitsos), a brilliant Athens-based law student. Then when disaster upends Yannis’s business and forces him back on the seas, Marina – isolated and now a mother – succumbs to desire, leading to a dangerous and turbulent love triangle.
When DQ speaks to Peluso and director Vardis Marinakis (Silent Road), editing has just been completed on the six-episode melodrama, with Marinakis describing making the series as a “marathon.” Produced by Foss Productions for Greek broadcaster ERT in coproduction with Boo Productions, Mompracem and distributor Beta Film, the show is due to debut in November.
“It was a marathon; an adventurous, melodramatic process like the story,” he says. “It’s been an amazing experience with ups and downs and great relationships. I had the chance to work with amazingly creative people, and the result is this collaboration.”
“When you do such a huge piece of work with all those people, you feel like a family – and it’s been going on for six months,” Peluso says of filming the series. “It’s a huge piece of life that you’re giving to others and sharing with others. It’s not just the work, it’s also your human life and your personal life. In the middle, I was like, ‘I don’t know if we’re going to finish.’ It was so huge. The story is incredible, but it’s an odyssey and a huge tragedy, so it was really overwhelming for me at some points. Looking back, I’m so glad we made it.”
With a role full of charged energy and emotion, Peluso stars as a “really complicated human being” in a series that doesn’t shy away from her “dark sides.”
“She had a really difficult past, with her family and what she had to endure, because her mother was a prostitute who was taking people home all the time,” the actor says of her character. “Society was also always putting her in a cage, and she was not able to express herself, her sexuality and her body. She grows up with some really masochistic sides, and she can be a really acidic person sometimes.
“Somehow it’s really disturbing for us reading that, because we know that deep inside all of us, we have some things we don’t accept even of ourselves. I found that really interesting. But after digging so much for these months, also into my personality, it was really difficult because I had to accept many things also of myself.”
Peluso and Marinakis spent time together discussing Marina’s mentality and her psychology, returning to Karagatsis’s novel and adding ideas or thoughts to the scripts by Panagiotis Iosifelis (I paralia).
The director first read the 1953 book when Foss Productions approached him to take on the adaptation. “I knew the author and I loved him, but I hadn’t read the book,” he says. Then when he did pick it up, “I got electrified by what I was reading.”
His chief ambition became finding a way to bring the emotions evoked by the book to viewers watching the series. “This was a challenge for me to achieve, to realise the narration of the events and of people and, at the same time, to have this mystic quality and this dark quality, this poetic quality. You don’t usually get that in series. You don’t get the poetry and the sometimes trance-like moments, but we see that here.”
That Marinakis would direct the whole series was never in doubt, having previously done the same on drama Silent Road. He likens the process to making a film, with his feature credits including Greek titles Mavro Iivadi, Zizotek and Defteri fysi.
“It was really important to have the same point of view [across the series],” says Peluso. “Sometimes having different directors really enhances a project. But for this one in particular, it was important to have a great connection with one person guiding you.”
“It was like a big film,” the director adds. “In Greece, there was a lot of talk just six months before we began shooting about if it was a book that represents patriarchal views on femininity. We’re talking about a book that was written in 1950s and now we’re in 2025.”
“I would like all these themes to not be in sync with our period anymore,” says Peluso. “There are so many things related to what we were before and how we thought before, and how many things unfortunately haven’t changed yet, so it’s still really important to talk about the place of the woman in the society.”
Chasing Yannis to Greece and then falling for his brother, Marina undoubtedly makes some questionable decisions. But Peluso is sympathetic when it comes to her character’s actions, “because she’s a woman and a human being who is always seeking her freedom,” she says. “Even if she doesn’t achieve that, because of her limitations and because of the limitation society puts on her, it was really admirable for me to see a person who is always chasing some kind of freedom, and she tries. That’s life. I don’t think it’s easy to say we are free people.”
On set, Marinakis captured the show’s stunning backdrops with anamorphic lenses that add texture to the images, with aspirations to connect the characters in the foreground with their environments.
“So the anamorphic lens puts a background and the surroundings among the character, which makes it more dramatic and you can have a wide shot that is like a close-up, in a way,” he explains. “But every image we shot had the feeling of the universe of the book and of Marina. We didn’t just shoot people talking or being, it’s a miniseries that has another character – the atmosphere. It’s part of the whole thing. For me, the most important thing in the story is whatever you do, you make the universe believable. A director needs to make the universe believable and to let the talent of the creative people emerge.”
As such, Marinakis adopts a “spectator” role on set, leaving Peluso to act upon the “homework” she had completed in preparation to play Marina and “sink” into the world of the story. The show also marked the first time the actor had worked with an intimacy coordinator.
“We did rehearsals, but from then on, when we were shooting, I always wanted the actors to bring their thing,” he says. “I didn’t want to say, ‘Show this here, and you feel that.’ I don’t like to work like that. I like to be surprised, then I act like the audience. I want to get excited when we’re shooting. Maybe we do something in a perfect way, but there’s no ‘life’ there so we need to collaborate and put in an ingredient you wouldn’t expect, and create chemistry.”
“We had so much space to invent things and to create, and the discussions led to some new things,” Peluso says. “That was the main cool thing about our job, that we were always changing and evolving the scenes.”
The actor now hopes the series sparks discussions about the role of women in society and how people perceive relationships, love and sex. “I hope they’re really asking themselves questions and that there is some message that passes through,” she says.
“I want them to be moved by the story and by the people, which is my main concern,” Marinakis adds. “I care about the images, but I want people to feel things. Our approach was to have a cinematic take on a series that’s going to have a lot of different people watching, so we are saying something also in the way we tell the story.”
Like that? Watch this! Suggested by AI, selected by DQ
To Nisi (The Island): A young woman’s search for her family’s secrets leads her to Spinalonga, a former leper colony off Crete, where she uncovers forbidden love and long-buried tragedy.
Deligianneion Parthenagogeion: In pre-Second World War Greece, a progressive young teacher disrupts the strict order at a girls’ boarding school, challenging tradition and exposing hidden passions.
Agries Melisses (Wild Bees): In 1950s Thessaly, three sisters try to protect their family farm from an aristocratic family, only to be caught in a violent drama of revenge, love and dark secrets.
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tagged in: Beta Film, Boo Productions, ERT, Foss Productions, Fotinì Peluso, Mompracem, The Great Chimera, Vardia Marinakis