By Michael Pickard
October 29, 2025

Ahead of the launch of sweeping Greek melodrama The Great Chimera, star Fotinì Peluso and director Vardis Marinakis reveal how they collaborated on this adaptation of M Karagatsis’s celebrated novel about a complex heroine caught up in a turbulent love triangle.

Described as a modern classic, The Great Chimera by Greek author M Karagatsis is a novel that explores desire, devotion and identity to tell the story of a young woman caught between her own passion and social expectations.

Now, a six-part series filmed across the Greek island of Syros, the capital Athens and the Italian city of Trieste brings this tragic 1930s love story to the screen for the first time.

The cast is led by rising Italian star Fotinì Peluso (Everything Calls for Salvation), who plays the restless Marina. Eager to flee her troubled family past in Trieste and obsessed with classical Greek culture, Marina falls in love with Greek sea captain Yannis and follows him to the sun-drenched island of Syros to begin a new life in the home of her distrustful mother-in-law.

As Yannis (Andreas Konstantinou) strives to build a shipping empire with her financial support, Marina enjoys her new life. But she is soon charmed by Yannis’s younger brother Minas (Dimitris Kitsos), a brilliant Athens-based law student. Then when disaster upends Yannis’s business and forces him back on the seas, Marina – isolated and now a mother – succumbs to desire, leading to a dangerous and turbulent love triangle.

When DQ speaks to Peluso and director Vardis Marinakis (Silent Road), editing has just been completed on the six-episode melodrama, with Marinakis describing making the series as a “marathon.” Produced by Foss Productions for Greek broadcaster ERT in coproduction with Boo Productions, Mompracem and distributor Beta Film, the show is due to debut in November.

“It was a marathon; an adventurous, melodramatic process like the story,” he says. “It’s been an amazing experience with ups and downs and great relationships. I had the chance to work with amazingly creative people, and the result is this collaboration.”

“When you do such a huge piece of work with all those people, you feel like a family – and it’s been going on for six months,” Peluso says of filming the series. “It’s a huge piece of life that you’re giving to others and sharing with others. It’s not just the work, it’s also your human life and your personal life. In the middle, I was like, ‘I don’t know if we’re going to finish.’ It was so huge. The story is incredible, but it’s an odyssey and a huge tragedy, so it was really overwhelming for me at some points. Looking back, I’m so glad we made it.”

With a role full of charged energy and emotion, Peluso stars as a “really complicated human being” in a series that doesn’t shy away from her “dark sides.”

“She had a really difficult past, with her family and what she had to endure, because her mother was a prostitute who was taking people home all the time,” the actor says of her character. “Society was also always putting her in a cage, and she was not able to express herself, her sexuality and her body. She grows up with some really masochistic sides, and she can be a really acidic person sometimes.

“Somehow it’s really disturbing for us reading that, because we know that deep inside all of us, we have some things we don’t accept even of ourselves. I found that really interesting. But after digging so much for these months, also into my personality, it was really difficult because I had to accept many things also of myself.”

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