We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Francesca Pecchi a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Francesca, thanks for joining us today. Are you happy as a creative professional? Do you sometimes wonder what it would be like to work for someone else?

The endless struggles that come with being a self-made artist in the most competitive city in the world doest get me thinking every now and then about whether this difficult journey actually makes me happy. I ask myself – do I like this life or do I only like the idea of it?

So the answer is yes – I do wonder what it would be like to have a regular job quite often. But you know what? When I do, I then see everything I worked so hard for my whole life go out the window. Even though I may not be where I want to be or where I had pictured myself to be at this time, I am still somewhere very far away from when I first started, which means somehow I did work my way up to this point. And I know that if I stopped now, I would only live a life with regret haunted by own thoughts, wondering what would have happened if I had just kept going just a little longer.

Happiness comes and goes like everything else in life, but on my creative journey so far it’s so come so often that every time it comes back it makes up for all those tough times I found myself overcoming. I don’t know if I could say the same if I was doing a regular job. A creative is something you are, it is a mind set, it doesn’t just go away by working a nine to five.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I am a multicultural actor and director navigating the New York acting scene. Born and raised in Brussels by Italian parents, I relocated to NYC where I graduated from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and co-founded Thymos Productions LLC. Thymos is a production company created in 2024 from an idea by me and Lucia Sapienza – a fellow Italian artist who relocated to New York City with a simple dream to create art. Our company’s main mission is to reveal and showcase international talents. The goal is to build a safe space for a multicultural community of people who share a strong desire to tell stories. We are constantly looking to collaborate with writers, actors, dancers, singers, and filmmakers. . . anyone who defines themselves a storyteller.

I first got into the acting craft at the age of thirteen when I joined a local theatre company back in Brussels and ever since then there hasn’t been a day where I haven’t thought about doing this for the rest of my life. The world of theatre, as someone who used to be very insecure, allowed me to escape those haunting voices through a series of self-exploration work that led me to finally be myself. Once I realised the power that it had on me, I also understood the power that storytelling has when it comes to change and spreading awareness. I once read a quote by Mother Teresa that said “we are one drop of the ocean but without that drop the ocean would be smaller” and suddenly everything made sense to me.
So, once I graduated high school, I told myself if I was going to do this, I was going to start my journey in the global center of storytelling which is New York City. It’s funny – everyone tells me that I was so brave to move to the other side of the world to pursue this calling of mine to become an actor but the truth is that I was too scared I was going to regret not trying in the first place for the rest of my life.

One of my proudest moments since I finished my professional training at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts is when I put up an off-off Broadway show with two fellow alumnus. In December 2023, the three of us co-wrote, co-directed and starred in an original comedic play called “Miss Universe”, which sold out very unexpectedly. For me, that was proof that when you get your head in the game, you are able to create whatever you want once you have the professional tools. Then I immediately knew I wanted to keep creating new original art. As a result, my project for Thymos started developing.

Now, I am currently working on Thymos’ debut show “The Suppliant Maidens” – an original adaptation directed by Lucia Sapienza which will be premiering at the New York Theater Festival at the Hudson Guild Theater on May 15, 17, and 19.
The show touches on what it means to be an immigrant and seeking exile as well as finding a place where you belong – a timeless topic that a lot of us can relate to in different ways. In fact, the cast is an all-female ensemble entirely made of international actors from all over the world such as Italy, Mexico, Finland, Peru, Belgium and the UK.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

A lesson I struggled to unlearn is that we are the ones who write our own destiny. I don’t think we write it… but I strongly believe that we define it through our actions and to me there is a huge difference between the two. Today I am not where I had pictured myself to be three years ago and it almost sounds disappointing to hear. However, I am somewhere in the process that I had never ever imagined myself to be in the first place and that makes it even better. Once I graduated high school, I had a huge debate with myself on whether I should have gone to acting school first or if I should have secured a Bachelor degree for myself first. I was in a major crisis because one option came from the heart and the other one came from the rational side of me, which is the brain. What I ended up doing was applying to both colleges and acting schools as I told myself to first wait and see if I could actually manage to get admitted to any acting school given the competition that’s out there. It was useless to think about facing the problem before it actually presented itself.
Eventually, not only I got in but I got into my top one acting school. As ridiculous as that sounded to me at first, I took it as a sign and told myself to go for it and stop waiting and overthinking it. Now that I have graduated from the Academy, I feel like it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me and I know for a fact that, if I would have gone to college, today I wouldn’t be living in New York City and have my own production company. That doesn’t mean I won’t ever go to college, but it tells me that sometimes we just have to trust the process as we blindly navigate this journey that is life.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

From my experience so far, the most rewarding aspect of doing what we do is when we act as mirrors for people’s souls. More often than not, in an audience crowd, there will always be at least one person who will see a part of themselves reflected in the character you are portraying. When that happens, consciously or subconsciously, you are leading them through a personal journey that somehow will mark them for the short or long term. As an artist, that to me is priceless because, even if just on a small scale, I was able to put an audience member in contact with their own emotions and feelings about their personal dynamics and that’s how I know my storytelling is already worth something. For example, my heart gets filled with joy every time someone approaches me after a show and tells me that I had them “feel things”. I much rather hear that over getting comments on my performance because what I am personally interested in is their experience of the show.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.francescapecchi.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/francesca_pecchi
• Other: THYMOS PRODUCTIONS: https://www.thymosproductions.com/

Image Credits
Nicola Marra de Scisciolo, Deborah Gerofsky, Libby Yowell