Keeping fit for opera? It's the same as martial arts!

A young man Riccardo Massi auditioned for La Scala’s Young Artist programme in 2007 with a shaved head, swollen eye and covered in cuts and bruises. It did not, initially, go well. “They wouldn’t let me in,” Riccardo laughs.

- As tenor Riccardo Massi prepares to star in The Royal Opera's II Trovatore, he tells STEFAN KYRIAZIS about his stuntman past, being heckled and why he would struggle with Wagner

Not quite the hooligan he appeared, he had been funding his music studies as a bouncer and working at Rome’s legendary Cinecittà film studios.

“I do not come from a family of artists,” he says. “My father was an entrepreneur who loved opera but he cannot sing.

“My mother owns a shoe shop and never sang — but she has perfect pitch. So, I am a strange mix of them.”

Growing up in tiny Sarnano, a remote central Italian town, he studied karate at the local gym.

After high school, he moved to Rome and trained in Brazilian jiu-jitsu and Muay Thai.

“I joined a dojo that taught medieval fighting with the sword and shield, spear, knife, double sword,” he recalls.

“It was very well-connected with the stuntman community.”

For a decade he worked on local and international projects at the film studios, learning from famous stars like Leonardo DiCaprio in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York (2000). “We were not allowed to speak to the actors,” he says, “but I was doing what Italians call ‘steal with your eyes’. Especially Daniel Day Lewis in Gangs of New York. That guy is amazing, always in character, even off camera.”

But Riccardo also dreamed of singing.

“It was there in me,” he says. “I said, ‘OK, let’s try’, and I found a teacher.”

One day, after filming a brutal fight scene for the HBO series Rome, the phone rang.