Isabella Rossellini on Conclave, Catholicism and the family business

It may be a cliché to say, but in Edward Berger's new film, Conclave, Isabella Rossellini is able to say a lot without hardly saying anything at all.

The film is a fictional drama that lifts the curtain on the Vatican's mysterious ceremony to elect a new pope. Rossellini plays the silent yet formidable Sister Agnes (one of the few women in the story) who's responsible for tending to the cardinals as they make their decision. With a single look or the clearing of her throat, the Italian actor is able to convey her character's grave disappointment, moral concern or quiet solidarity.

In an interview with Q's Tom Power, recorded during the Toronto International Film Festival, Rossellini says Conclave was an "easy yes" for her.

"The script was so wonderful and [the film was] shot in Rome, where I grew up," she tells Power. "I loved, particularly, my role because in the church, of course, the role of women and men is very different…. Sister Agnes has to be invisible and yet completely present. I don't have much to say, although, in the film I think everybody knows exactly what she's thinking."

Though Rossellini and her late parents, the cinema icons Roberto Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman, weren't necessarily religious, she says she was familiar with the film's subject matter because Catholicism is so interwoven with Italian culture.

"I can maybe compare [it] to Jewish people who may not go to the synagogue, but they are Jewish by culture," she says. "So Italians are glued together, even if they are not a believer, but they do have a kind of a Catholic glue."

As the daughter of two very famous parents, Rossellini chose not to pursue acting right away. Instead, she made a name for herself in modelling, becoming the highest-paid model in the world after signing an exclusive deal with Lancôme in 1982.

"My father, Roberto Rossellini, and my mother, Ingrid Bergman, were so well-known and so talented, and I was intimidated," she says. "I thought that maybe I should do something on my own…. Modelling became very successful, and I was very happy to have a career that was separated from cinema, from my parents, that was my own."

It wasn't until she received encouragement from the American fashion photographer Richard Avedon that she decided to make the switch to the screen.

"[He] used to say, 'But Isabella, modeling is a little bit like acting,'" she recalls. "'You don't have lines, but I'm not photographing a beautiful nose or a beautiful mouth, I'm photographing emotion and you are emoting in front of my camera.' … Modelling, generally, is very brief. Two years, three years, and then that's it. So it was only in my 30s that I decided to become an actress, and then in my 50s to become a director. It just took me a long time."

The full interview with Isabella Rossellini is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Isabella Rossellini produced by Vanessa Greco.