Do we like Monica Bellucci?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Decent on the record with no harmful words found, but there's little on LGBTQ+ issues and one unresolved tax matter, so it stops short of the top end.
Bellucci is one of Italy's biggest screen exports, and she has stayed busy well past the age at which the industry usually stops casting women. In 2021 she played screen siren Anita Ekberg in The Girl in the Fountain and collected a career award at the Torino Film Festival. She's the kind of star who talks about her work rather than her press.
On women and men she comes across as warm rather than combative. Asked about #MeToo, she credited the women who spoke up earlier and said she doesn't want to raise her girls to resent men. Her line at Torino was that she loves men but women inspire her. You can read that as gentle or as a bit dodgy on the politics. Either way, nothing in it demeans anyone.
The harm check came up clean in what we could find. We turned up no anti-trans or anti-gay remarks, no conspiracy rabbit holes, no vaccine or climate nonsense, and no campaigning against anyone's rights. The gap is that she hasn't said much on LGBTQ+ issues at all, so this is a pass on absence of harm rather than a stack of allies' quotes.
Her recent work doesn't set off alarms either. The Birthday Party is a tense arthouse home-invasion thriller from French director Léa Mysius, and one Cannes reviewer called Bellucci its undisputed highlight as a melancholic artist next door. We found no sign she's been making films with people pushing grievance politics.
The one real blot on her record is financial. In 2018 Swiss outlet swissinfo reported she was suspected of tax evasion in France over 2011 to 2013, after Swiss accounts allegedly linked to an offshore shell company were flagged. Her lawyer said French authorities should never have been allowed to open proceedings. We couldn't find an outcome, so it stays an allegation, and she hasn't been charged on anything we read.
She also got dragged into a copyright stoush as a bystander. In October 2025 director Tom Volf asked a Lyon court to summon her as a witness in his dispute with the producers of the Maria Callas documentary she starred in. She's not the target of it, and we couldn't find how it ended.