He has won the European Film Award for Best Actor twice, in 2008 for both Gomorrah and Il Divo and in 2013 for The Great Beauty, as well as winning the David di Donatello for Best Actor four times from 2002 to 2013.

In 2020, The New York Times ranked him #7 on its list of the 25 Greatest Actors of the 21st Century.

His international breakthrough roles came in 2008 as Giulio Andreotti in Il Divo and Roberto's boss Franco in Gomorrah.

Between 2000 and 2007, he also directed several opera productions,[1] including Cimarosa's Il marito disperato and Beethoven's Fidelio for the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples, and Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov at the Teatro Nacional de São Carlos in Lisbon, where in 2003 he also staged Richard Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos.

[4] In 2018 he portrayed Silvio Berlusconi and Ennio Doris in Sorrentino's Loro.