“Sharks have two dicks,” actor Isabella Rossellini tells me in a tone so casual, you’d think she was directing me towards the nearest bathroom. We’re in the bed and breakfast attached to her 28-acre estate, Mama Farm, located in Brookhaven, New York—a small Long Island town that is something of a hideaway for untouchable New Yorkers such as Anna Wintour and Martha Stewart. The rooms at the farm’s B&B are cozy and drenched in natural light; the walls are peppered with local artworks that almost exclusively depict animals. One large, brassy frame contains an image of two rhinos humping. It’s no secret that the Italian icon knows a lot about animals and their sex lives. In 2008, she created, wrote, directed, and starred in Green Porno, a Sundance Channel show about the mating and maternal behaviors of different animals, and in 2019, Rossellini earned a master’s degree in animal behavior from Hunter College. In 2013, she (literally) bought the farm and, contrary to the idiom’s implications, it brought her and the local community a new lease on life.

Sitting in a sun-soaked reading corner of the B&B while the 71-year-old Lancôme ambassador gets her makeup done and her three dogs lick at my ankles and tug on my pants, Rossellini tells me she decided to dedicate herself to this venture because she was interested in animals. “Instead of having a house with a tennis court or a swimming pool,” she thought, “I’ll have a little farm like the one we used to have in Italy. ” During the summer, the property has the buzzing, communal energy of an Italian piazza, with folks coming in from the city and neighboring towns to try the now-famous farm-to-table dosas made by Patty Gentry, a chef-turned-farmer who rents 3 acres from Mama Farm for her project, Early Girl Farm. “I like conviviality. Maybe if there was another owner, they’d say, ‘This is private property, and here’s my gun: Bang, bang!” Rossellini shares before erupting into laughter, finger guns in place.

There’s a hard-to-place yet timeless girlishness to Isabella Rossellini, as evidenced by her playfulness. She is the daughter of two cinema icons, Italian director Roberto Rossellini and Swedish actor, star of Casablanca, Ingrid Bergman; Rossellini’s childhood was, as expected, colorful. In a 1983 interview with David Letterman, she recalls having “all sorts of animals: cats, dogs, and, Father once came up to the hotel where we were living during the divorce with a kangaroo.” Perhaps it was this early exposure to exotic animals—in addition to the charming chip in her front tooth, a relic from her childhood spats with her brother Roberto—that has kept the actor’s youthful wonder and whimsy intact throughout the decades. Aside from her beloved roles in cult classics like Blue Velvet and Death Becomes Her, Rossellini has also pursued passion projects like her 2018 book, My Chickens and I—copies of which can be found on Mama Farm, discreetly tucked into stacks of other titles—and the adorably named documentary Animals Distract Me, filmed in collaboration with the Discovery Channel.

Talking to Rossellini, it’s clear that she defines happiness as a morning full of goats, dogs, and chickens. She jokes that traditional narratives of success were never really for her, anyway, “I don’t care about the green lawn because I didn’t grow up with it. I’m not like, Look, my lawn is so green, it is mowed so well,” she quips in a lofty accent. In addition to Mama Farm, Rossellini also has four movies coming out this year which include La Chimera (an Italian-language movie starring recent VMAN cover star Josh O’Connor) and Problemista (an A24 production written and directed by El Salvadorian comedian, Julio Torres).

When we spoke, she was gearing up for the French and Italian run of a monologue-style stage performance called “Darwin’s Smile” inspired by “the book [Charles] Darwin wrote called The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals where he wondered why smiling or trembling, or screaming, is understood all over the world.” Rossellini is busy and shows no signs of slowing down. Thankfully, running after chickens and eating locally grown produce has proven to be very good at keeping people young, spry, and, by Rossellini’s definition, happy.

This story appears in the pages of V147: now available for purchase!

Photography Sam Hellmann

Makeup Linda Gradin (L’Atelier) using LANCÔME

Stylist assistant Brandon Brownstein

Production assistant Isabella Roy

Location Mama Farm