Acting · Performance · Movement
Luca & Gabriele Stifani.
Italian twin actors and performers from Salento, Luca and Gabriele work across screen, theatre, physical performance, and the living image. Their connection is immediate; their performances remain individual, specific, and alive.
Italian roots · International practice
Two performers who understand one another instinctively without ever becoming interchangeable.
Raised in Salento and now working internationally, Luca and Gabriele bring a distinctly physical and visual sensitivity to acting. Years of working together have given them an unusual awareness of rhythm, reaction, silence, and the smallest change in another actor.
The resemblance creates an immediate dramatic possibility, but their work is built on difference. Each brother approaches character independently, with his own impulses, timing, emotional life, and relationship to the camera or audience.
They can perform as twins, brothers, doubles, rivals, or entirely separate characters. What connects the work is a commitment to truthful behaviour and close, responsive listening.
Before the first performance
Luca and Gabriele were behind the camera, filming Hamlet Zar and working closely with director Vahid Evazzadeh, while spending sustained time in the performance culture shaped by Eugenio Barba and Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium. They watched rehearsal, discipline, risk, and transformation unfold at close range—but never imagined that the next bodies sent onto a stage would be their own.
Philippe Blanchard changed that with a telephone call that came completely out of the blue. At the time, money was scarce and neither brother had performance training or stage credits. Philippe was not looking for polished dancers; he saw presence, instinct, and a relationship between two people that could not be manufactured. He asked them to trust him before they had any reason to believe they belonged there.
The work began with a risk: Philippe trusted them, and they trusted him back.
From first duet to international stages
How About You? reached the stage at Dansens Hus in Stockholm in 2010 and became a breakout work at ICE HOT later that year. The sixty-minute duet travelled across Europe and North America, including Paris, New York, Ottawa, and Albuquerque, New Mexico. Contemporary coverage praised the work’s humour, intelligence, and the brothers’ natural stage presence; Canada’s National Arts Centre described its European reception as unanimous critical acclaim.
Philippe later invited them to co-create a second duet, Original Copy, subsequently titled This Is That. It had its world premiere at Dance City in Newcastle in 2013, followed by its Swedish premiere at Dansens Hus in Stockholm and performances across Malmö, Münster, Lecce, Nottingham, and London. Reviewers singled out their charisma, precision, and the way comedy and physical tension could live in the same moment.
Both works investigate the unstable space between two people who look the same but do not experience the world in the same way. More importantly, both made Luca and Gabriele fully responsible for the life of the room. That responsibility still grounds their acting: listen completely, commit without protection, and trust the person playing opposite you.
Watch the theatre work
How About You?The first duet
How About You?Dansens Hus · Stockholm
Performance researchWorkshop process
ResidencyCatania · Italy
Contemporary response
Screen & television acting
Selected acting credits across television drama, independent screen work, and commercial performance.
2017 · History Channel
Cast together as the Flores brothers: Luca as Margarito Flores and Gabriele as Pedro Flores. Their natural connection grounded the relationship, while each brother created a separate character with his own pressure, intention, and inner life.
Watch the project2022 · Warner Bros. / DC
Luca was cast as the Trattoria Owner in the DC feature filmed in Glasgow. Although the film was ultimately not released, entering Gotham remains one of the most exciting experiences of his screen career.
Watch Luca’s self-tapeIndependent short film
An early short film featuring Luca and Gabriele at the beginning of their acting careers: a compact story built with precision, invention, and complete commitment.
Commercial performance
Their performance work includes Japan Journey Journal for Suzuki—a format in which character, tone, and relationship must register immediately.
The living image
Luca and Gabriele are registered professional life and character models with RAM. Life drawing, body painting, and durational posing are not acting credits, but they demand many of the same disciplines: patience, physical control, awareness of silhouette, and the confidence to communicate without dialogue.
These collaborations belong in their acting biography because they sharpen how the brothers understand presence, gesture, image, and the expressive body. The role they played in each project is identified below so artistic influence is never confused with a performance credit.
Living canvas · Body painting
Painted into the same abstract world as the backdrop, the brothers became both models and compositional elements. The collaboration asked them to hold shape, proximity, and expression while the boundary between body and painted surface deliberately disappeared.
Explore Anne-Claire’s work
Portraiture · Posing
Their continuing collaboration with Italian artist Michele Del Campo turns observation into portraiture. They posed for works including The Twins and The Twins – Awakening, the latter exhibited in New York, and later took part in his quarantine portrait project.
Explore Michele’s workOptical illusion · Body painting
Working with Alexa Meade placed the brothers inside a painted optical illusion: three-dimensional bodies treated as the surface of a two-dimensional image. It strengthened their understanding of how colour, stillness, angle, and tiny physical adjustments transform what a camera perceives.
Visit Alexa Meade ArtFilm editing · Artistic exchange
This long creative relationship is included as context, not as an acting credit. Luca and Gabriele edit Tereza Bušková’s moving-image work; their connection to projects such as Little Queens and Mothers Without Hands is through film editing and artistic exchange, rather than performing. Working closely with her imagery of ritual, gesture, and cultural memory has nevertheless informed their visual literacy as actors.
Explore Tereza’s workOne partnership, two actors
Each brother brings an individual temperament and process to the shared work.
Actor · Performer
Luca brings clarity, playfulness, and a strong sense of dramatic structure to performance. He is attentive to the arc of a scene and to the small behavioural shift that changes how an audience reads a character.
Luca on Spotlight
Actor · Performer
Gabriele brings sensitivity to stillness, physical detail, and the emotional life beneath a line—an instinct for how a camera or audience reads thought before dialogue explains it.
Gabriele on Spotlight
Still training. Still curious.
Luca and Gabriele train regularly in acting for camera with Instinctual Acting in London. The continuing practice keeps their work truthful, responsive, and ready for the demands of a close-up, a self-tape, an ensemble, or a live audience.
Their shared history is an advantage, never a shortcut. Every role begins again with listening, specificity, preparation, and the willingness to be surprised.
Casting & collaboration