Marco Perego, who is married to Zoe Saldaña, tells PEOPLE he "can't believe" two movies he produced won Cannes Film Festival's top awards this year
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NEED TO KNOW
- Marco Perego tells PEOPLE about his “very surreal” experience at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival
- Perego, who is married to Zoe Saldaña, produced three movies that debuted in Cannes’ competition
- Two of those movies, Fjord and Minotaur, won the festival’s top awards
Marco Perego is still coming down from a movie producer's dream at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival.
Perego, the 47-year-old Italian husband of Zoe Saldaña, broke into film producing in recent years and hit big at this May's festival in France when he became the first producer to ever have three movies premiere in the festival's main competition.
Those titles include Sebastian Stan's upcoming movie Fjord and Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson's new movie Paper Tiger, as well as a movie titled Minotaur from Russian filmmaker Andrey Zvyagintsev. Fjord and Minotaur won Cannes' top two awards, the Palme d'Or and Grand Prix, respectively, cementing the films as must-watches for next winter's awards season and Perego as one of the movie industry's top up-and-coming producers.
"Very surreal. Very grateful and very surreal," Perego tells PEOPLE of the experience in an interview, days after the festival's end.
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Prior to moving into filmmaking, Perego, who shares three sons with Saldaña, also 47, played soccer competitively and worked as an artist. He began producing in the 2010s and made his debut in earnest as a writer-director-producer with the 2023 movie The Absence of Eden, which Saldaña also acted in.
He is among a number of producers who helped bring Fjord, Minotaur and Paper Tiger to the big screen. In that sense, he says that his background as an athlete in team sports "is a very interesting pillar of what I'm building now" with his company Leaf Entertainment.
"As a soccer player, what you're doing is not about the individual, but it's about the collective, and victory is about [the] collective," Perego says. "I think that part of work ethic and discipline and teamwork is very interesting for me when I approach this new adventure of this community I'm trying to build. It's teamwork — how strong is the vision of the director, how can we support [them], how are we collaborating with great producers? I think there is a lot about soccer involved in that."
Perego tells PEOPLE that he grew up watching movies from pivotal 20th-century filmmakers like Federico Fellini, Andrei Tarkovsky, Stanley Kubrick and all manners of "old Italian film." He aims for Leaf Entertainment to function as a fervent supporter of independent filmmaking, which he describes as "completely endangered" at the moment due to a lack of financial stability for filmmakers who do not solely rely on major Hollywood studios for their budgets.
"I really love it. I watch one film a day and I'm really obsessed with cinema. I love to collaborate, I'm trying to, all the time, surround myself with people better than me, and that's what I find very interesting," he says.
Credit: Daniele Venturelli/WireImage
When it comes to the Palme d'Or winner Fjord, Perego tells PEOPLE that its star, Stan, 43, delivers a "complete transformation" akin to his performance as Donald Trump in 2024's The Apprentice. (Stan received his first career Oscar nomination for his performance in that movie.)
Fjord follows Stan and Renate Reinsve (Backrooms, Sentimental Value) as a religious couple who settle in Norway with their children and quickly find tension developing between their family and their new neighbors.
"It's brave," Perego says of Stan's performance. "I am very grateful to just be one small part of this film, and I'm just very grateful to be part of it. Every project I undertake, whatever I do is guided by the same mission and the mission is the opportunity to protect culture and empower all these visionary [filmmakers]. The more vision they have, the more I want to support it."
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Only a week removed from the end of the festival, it seems Perego's success in Cannes is still sinking in. "By the way, I can't believe that I won. Look at me. I can't believe that I won," he adds.
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