Twenty years old in October, after her debut in the series Mare Fuori, the British actress, in Italy since she was 12, is already on her first major international challenge. Alongside Sir Anthony Hopkins.
I was on my way to the set where the Kyshan Wilson shoot was taking place and I knew my situation was serious when I found myself crossing the horrendous Piazzale Loreto intersection with the theme song blasting in my headphones, singing, "Nun te preoccupa' guaglio, c sta o mar for, c sta o mar for, c sta o mar for." I wonder how many like me. The virus of Mare fuori, the Rai series now in its third season (the first two are also available on Netflix, and confirmation of a fourth has recently arrived, while there is already talk of a fifth and sixth) has spread throughout Italy and reinforced, for the umpteenth time, the myth of a city that seemed to need no further celebration after years of Liberato & Ferrante Fever. An unexpected success, the series succeeded in the most difficult and coveted feat: conquering Gen Z. Even the always semi-serious and impassioned "critiques"-on TikTok you can find everything from the girl listing the most cringeworthy love scenes to the young lawyer reviewing all the errors in criminal law (lots of them)-denote the obsessive viewing of each of the 36 episodes that make up the three seasons.
"THE PATH BETWEEN PINE AND KUBRA IN THE SEA OUTSIDE IS A SMALL STORY THAT MAY TEACH SOMETHING IMPORTANT, HOWEVER."
– Kyshan Wilson
If the first episode begins with the two main characters, in subsequent episodes the story of each of the boys and girls locked up in the Naples juvenile prison takes shape. And, inevitably, in each viewer, preferences are born and, as young people say, "ships" (two characters one would like to become a couple) take shape.
I, for example, bet on Kubra and Pino right from the start, winning. Their realistic and tender love story stands out among others that are a bit cloying (Filippo and Naditza) or extremely dramatic (Gemma and Gianni). Pino and Kubra are Ukrainian actor Artem Tkachuk and the beautiful Kyshan Wilson, featured in this report. If their story is so moving, the credit is mainly due to their performance. I was very surprised, therefore, to discover that the one in Sea Out is Kyshan's first ever role. Her Kubra, a tough and aggressive girl with a strong aversion to the male gender, is arrested because, in a fit of rage, she stabs her mother Latifah, a prostitute of African descent who begs her to prostitute herself in turn, in order to comply with the request of a client who, in exchange for sexual intercourse with the underage girl, has promised that he will get them a council house.
"I DON'T KNOW IF I BELIEVE IN DESTINY, BUT I THINK HAVING HAD THAT THOUGHT THAT DAY OF LOOKING FOR AUDITIONS AND FINDING THE SEA ONE OUTSIDE, IT WASN'T REALLY AN ACCIDENT"
– Kyshan Wilson
There is nothing Kubra about the girl I watch move in front of the lens during the shoot: if in the series she is a perpetual tomboy in overalls, here is a young Beyoncé, sexy and glittery. In between photos we comment on the tragicomic TikToks of the girls who self-apply to participate in the filming of Mare fuori 4 ("I have a perfect Neapolitan accent," says a young girl evidently from Bergamo, "but I can also come and clean or cook for the cast, I can do so many things"): it is clear that the actors and actresses of the series are not only the most desired but also the most envied. Kyshan arrived in the second season. "'These TikTok guys I like a lot and they crack me up! I had seen the first season, was a fan, and the audition almost "manifested" it for me (from manifesting, the viral trend on TikTok where if you think fervently about something and convince yourself it will happen, you actually make it happen, nda). It had been a month since the first episodes had come out, so there was still little talk about it, and I had said to my best friend, "Come on, let's go audition for the second season".My other friends had laughed ("Yeah, sure, dream on") and that was the end of it. Six months later we were in lockdown and I was bored, I didn't know what to do with my life, I was in a kind of mid-life crisis (as she says this she bursts out laughing: Kyshan is 19, nda).
Wandering online looking for auditions I had found that for Mare Fuori 2 they were looking for a girl just like me. Bad luck in good luck, by the time I got back to upload all the material (I wanted to have perfect photos and it had taken me a few days) the casting was already closed. There was no contact information, but with my F.B.I. skills I saw that by searching the ad on Google an email would appear, although when you clicked it was gone. So I sent a very long email explaining that I would be the right choice, despite my lack of experience. The next day I got a call from the casting director, and from there we started auditioning, initially online because there was Covid, then, finally, in Rome." To prepare for the first role of her life, she listened to the advice of new colleagues, researched online, built her own tailored method by making a kind of collage, combining "a little piece of one method with a little piece of another," watched documentaries about juvenile prison.
"WE CAN ALL BE SUCCESSFUL, THERE IS ROOM FOR ALL OF US, AND THIS ALSO AFFECTS BLACK ACTRESSES […] WHY DOES THERE HAVE TO BE ONLY ONE BLACK ACTRESS? HERE, IF THERE IS NO ROOM FOR US, WE WILL CREATE IT."
– Kyshan Wilson
And speaking of friends: further increasing Gen Z's passion for the series were also the vlogs of the days on set that her colleagues posted on TikTok. The beautiful locations, the sea, the sun, the atmosphere. They look like a close-knit class on a field trip, the same euphoria and eagerness to mess around. "We often call ourselves a family," she confirms, "but maybe you said it better, it's true, we are like a class, a group of kids having fun." The world of juvenile prison, in a way, is also a kind of school, however, everything is different there, amplified: loves and friendships have to make their way against a backdrop of constant betrayals, perverse power games, abuse, violence and rivalry, even in the women's section. In reality, this is not the case; she and the other actresses in the series, all of whom are beautiful and very good, seem to get along very well.
She gets a chuckle thinking back to the viral TikTok of the scandalized nun who screams and runs to separate her and Serena De Ferrari (in the series the villainous Viola) kissing for a shoot. A meme, practically, that unintentionally made them champions of LGBTQ+ rights: "My generation thinks that supporting these rights is normal, but sometimes we forget that not everyone thinks like us." Basically, the nun's outraged reaction scandalized them, Kyshan and Serena:
"Consider that she and I were kissing for a shoot, so it was a fake kiss and we reacted by laughing, but then I thought about what it must be like to walk hand in hand with your girlfriend and be treated like that-that's definitely less funny."
The latest post on his Instagram profile announces that he will be part of the cast of Those About to Die, an epic drama set in the corrupt world of gladiatorial competition. Among her colleagues is Anthony Hopkins. Born and raised in London, Kyshan is a native English speaker and was looking forward to trying her hand at an international project (Italian projects include Sotto il sole di Amalfi, the sequel to the Netflix film Sotto il sole di Riccione, and the Mediaset series Viola come il mare). Within a couple of years she realized a dream she had always had but did not rely on much: "I'm not a nepo-baby," she explains to me with a laugh, "nothing against, though! My mom is a lawyer, my dad a barber, I always dreamed of being an actress but film and TV were not part of my reality, I had no connection, it seemed like an impossible thing, I didn't really know where to start. I don't know if I believe in destiny, but I think having that thought that day of looking for auditions and finding the one for Mare Fuori wasn't really an accident." Kyshan has lived in Italy since she was 12 years old, and together with her mother and older sister she moved from London to Rossano Calabro. "I'll be completely honest, it's been hell," she says when I ask her what it was like to deal with that change, "I found a much more closed mindset. But it's something that has served me well and that I wouldn't change" (as she says this I think of a letter Kubra wrote to his mother, "I realized that bad people make us better and show us what we want," nda), however, learning a new language, being immersed in a completely different culture during the formative years was not easy. For four years I felt lost, then I started to find the right people around me and mò I would never go back to England, I feel very Italian, for me here is home." Kyshan has lived in Naples for two years now,
"talking to people I realized that you either love it or you hate it. You either love the craziness, the chaos, or you can't make it and you have to be in a place that is more orderly, that works more. I love everything about Naples: the people, the culture, the food, the dialect, the accent. When I leave Naples everyone thinks I am Neapolitan, but if you ask my Neapolitan friends to describe my accent, they laugh."
Written by Michael Zippo
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