



1 / 12 Chevron Chevron Julia Roberts, “Pretty Woman.”

For the past twenty-five years, Italian audiences have heard Julia Roberts speak with the voice of Cristina Boraschi. When they watched Leonardo DiCaprio on “Growing Pains,” in the late eighties and early nineties, they heard Francesco Pezzulli. And they heard Pezzulli again in “Titanic,” which reached Italy in 1998, and last year, in “The Great Gatsby” and “The Wolf of Wall Street.” The character Jules Winnfield’s recitation of Ezekiel 25:17, in “Pulp Fiction,” is no less famous in Italy than it is in America, but there the distinctive voice belongs to Luca Ward, who has dubbed for Samuel L. Jackson in more than twenty films.

The practice of dubbing films began during the regime of Benito Mussolini, who, in 1930, banned the use of foreign languages in movies. This edict was rescinded after the Second World War, but not before it had shaped a lasting cultural preference: in Italy today, most foreign movies are dubbed rather than subtitled.

In 2008, the American photographer Reed Young saw the Italian-language version of “Into the Wild,” and, in the following years, he developed an interest in the world of the Italian doppiatori. He recently began work on a series of photographs that recreated scenes from iconic American movies, with Italian voice actors standing in for their stateside counterparts. Young, who worked on the project with Chiara Barzini, an Italian screenwriter who wrote about the dubbing industry for Harper’s, in 2012, said that some of the doppiatori were initially hesitant to participate in the shoot. “Some worried about being too old, and others were nervous posing for a film they hadn’t done in twenty years,” Young told me. Most of the voice actors, however, embodied their roles as soon as they stepped onto Young’s improvised sets, perhaps relishing the opportunity to be visible at last.

Photographs by Reed Young.