Martin Scorsese recently produced the Fox Nation series “The Saints,” but he himself looks more like a Biblical figure in a first look at his character from Julian Schnabel‘s “In the Hand of Dante.” Scorsese is bearded and bewhiskered in this adaptation of Nick Tosches’ 2002 book. And his character is a nameless man who otherwise goes by Isaiah. He’ll be playing an inspirational figure to Dante Alighieri, the 14th century Italian scribe best known for his epic poem “The Divine Comedy,” and it seems sure to be another of his distinctive on-camera appearances. (You can see the full image, an IndieWire exclusive, below.)
Like the book, Schnabel’s film will take place both in Italy in the early 1300s, when Dante is assembling his magnum opus, and also in 2001, when a handwritten manuscript supposedly from Dante himself is discovered in the Vatican library and goes through an elaborate process of authentication — with a mob boss ordering a fictionalized version of author Tosches to steal it. Oscar Isaac will play both Dante and Tosches.
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Scorsese’s “Isaiah” will only appear in the 14th century segments. Dante seeks his approval when he writes “Paradiso,” and it takes many visits before Isaiah gives it. Dante was sent to him by Guido Cavalcanti who was his mentor, and visits Isaiah whenever he can over the course of many years while he is in exile. (One can imagine Scorsese’s character from “Quiz Show,” with warm fatherliness, addressing Dante as “young man.”) Isaiah is meant to represent the highest form of wisdom.
“In the Hand of Dante,” also starring Jason Momoa, Gal Gadot, Gerard Butler, Al Pacino, and Franco Nero, will make its world premiere, appropriately enough, at the 2025 Venice Film Festival.
But cinephiles will particularly thrill to this grizzled image of Scorsese, looking exactly like a font of Renaissance wisdom who could have inspired the great writer. Scorsese’s acting filmography consists largely of cameos or brief scenes, but they’re always memorable — culminating in his first ever acting nomination, an Emmy nod as guest actor in “The Studio” this awards cycle.
Most memorable may be his sociopathic passenger in “Taxi Driver” — or rather, as he’s credited, Passenger Watching Silhouette. He asks Robert De Niro’s title character Travis Bickle to pull up in front of an apartment building where he watches the silhouette of a woman undressing. He tells Bickle that that’s his wife, she’s with another man, and in his jealousy he’s planning on killing her.
Oddly, he was able to leverage that simmering menace once again for his voice acting role in the 2004 animated comedy “Shark Tale” where much of the plot centers on a fish voiced by Will Smith owing Scorsese’s heavy-eyebrowed pufferfish money. Somehow the minds at DreamWorks knew that what Aughts kids wanted to see above all was Martin Scorsese as an underwater gangster. (That film was also a Venice premiere.)
The thing about that “Shark Tale” performance is that it leans so heavily into Scorsese’s persona — the eyebrows, the rapid-fire staccato delivery, the slightly manic vibe — that it shows why his acting work has had some limitations. There’s a moment at the beginning of his extraordinary documentary series “A Personal Journey Through American Movies with Martin Scorsese” (a multi-hour tribute to Scorsese’s favorite movies) that may show why. At the start of that, a real-time sketch takes place that takes the form of Scorsese’s profile. It calls to mind the signature profile sketch always associated with Alfred Hitchcock — like Hitch before him, Scorsese is a persona, and not quite elastic enough of one to stretch and fit many roles.
So, like Hitchcock, the blink-and-miss cameo has often been Scorsese’s approach in front of the camera: As a photographer in “The Age of Innocence,” say, or as a cameraman in “Hugo.” Of course there’s his speaking part at the end of “Killers of the Flower Moon,” where he plays a radio show host who’s just finished giving the radio-play version of the story that had unfolded over the previous three-and-a-half hours. It was an incredible meta commentary on how deep human tragedy becomes entertainment, “true crime.” And him being the one to play that role, as well as being the film’s director, almost suggests a certain questioning about how he, or any filmmaker, could have approached this material as respectfully as possible.
For our money, his greatest screen role is a very unexpected and strange one, a true bit of casting against type: His role as Vincent van Gogh in Akira Kurosawa’s “Dreams,” one of the great Japanese director’s most underrated movies. This roughly 10-minute segment in the anthology film, titled “Crows,” follows a young admirer of the artist who apparently jumps back through time and follows around his idol as they enter landscapes directly recreating some of van Gogh’s most famous paintings. Chopin’s “Raindrop” prelude plays as they go from painting to painting — kind of living out the fantasy of loving a painting so much you wish you could leap into it and live there for a bit — while Scorsese’s van Gogh talks about various things, such as his commitment to his art, which comes through with manic focus and and absolute intensity. He explains why he cut off his left ear: It gave him trouble while he was painting a self-portrait, so he got rid of it.
That absolute commitment to art, that feeling of being a conduit for the divinity of creation, feels like it could be what Scorsese is going for here as Dante’s mentor in “In the Hand of Dante.” It’ll be exciting to see.
“In the Hand of Dante” will premiere at the 2025 Venice Film Festival.
