Key Points
Francesca Scorsese knows her connection to her famous father, Martin Scorsese, has perks.
The actress and filmmaker directed the final episode of his new Fox Nation docudrama series, The Saints.
“I got this, obviously, because my dad was overseeing everything as the executive producer,” she said. “I’m not going to deny anything.”
Francesca Scorsese isn’t ashamed to say she’s her father’s daughter.
The 26-year-old actress and filmmaker directed the final episode of a new docudrama series that her dad spearheaded, Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints. With each episode covering the life of a different iconic figure from the annals of Catholic history, Francesca’s finale brings the canon into the internet age with Carlo Acutis, the so-called “Millennial Saint.”
The Fox Nation series is executive-produced and narrated by the Taxi Driver director, which has raised some eyebrows over his daughter’s hiring. But she’ll just clear things up herself.
“I got this, obviously, because my dad was overseeing everything as the executive producer,” she told Variety in a new interview. “I’m not going to deny anything. I’m honored to be given an opportunity like this, and I’m going to do my best.”
Steve Granitz/FilmMagic
Francesca Scorsese and Martin Scorsese in 2024
Francesca also addressed lending her name to a project on Fox Nation, the streaming arm of the notorious right-wing political news network.
Though she had “some hesitation” about directing for the streaming service, Francesca said, “I know how my dad feels with everything… I feel pretty much the same way as he does in terms of politics and everything, and I look up to him, and I really follow in his footsteps a lot of the time. But Fox was the only one that supported this project and that wanted to bring this project to life. I think there’s something to say about that.”
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The Saints episode about Saint Carlo Acutis, a 15-year-old who was canonized in September after dying from leukemia in 2006, was neither Francesca’s first time in the director’s chair nor her first time directing her father.
She got her start, as many children of film directors do, with uncredited roles as a baby in several of her dad’s films. She appeared in The Aviator and The Departed before she turned 8, and stayed in entertainment through her adolescence into adulthood, showing up in films like Tyler Taormina’s 2024 dramedy, Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, and co-directing her first short film, Crimson Ties, in 2022.
But it was Francesca’s viral TikToks, in which she directed her 83-year-old Oscar-winning dad, that won her a popular audience. She has shot him doing everything from showing off his movie memorabilia to guessing the meaning behind outlandish Gen Z slang.
Their kooky content even brought them all the way to the 2024 Super Bowl, where they recreated their infectious dynamic in a commercial for the website building service Squarespace.
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly