“Anti-redneck” agent in OSS 117, paranoid investigator in “Black Box” or lobbyist with questionable morals in “Goliath”: Pierre Niney can play anything. But at 32, the actor confides his preference for the roles of Mr. Everyone.
Actor Pierre Niney during a photo shoot in Paris on March 1, 2022
Actor Pierre Niney during a photo shoot in Paris on March 1, 2022
Pierre Niney, the quiet force of French cinema – Gallery
Actor Pierre Niney during a photo shoot in Paris on March 1, 2022
Actor Pierre Niney during a photo shoot in Paris on March 1, 2022
Actor Pierre Niney during a photo shoot in Paris on March 1, 2022
A few days following missing out on the César for best actor, he is back on screens with “Goliath”, an environmental thriller by Frédéric Tellier, in theaters on Wednesday.
Not the type to feel sorry for himself, the actor quips when AFP questions him on the subject: “At least it will have allowed us to reconcile with Gilles (Lellouche, editor’s note)”.
Named in the same category, the two men had staged their supposed rivalry on social networks. A front rivalry. The two companions also share, with Emmanuelle Bercot, the poster for “Goliath”.
“Coming to terms with reality”
Inspired by real events, the film offers a dive into the world of chemical industry lobbies through the fate of three characters: a farmer (Emmanuelle Bercot), a lawyer (Gilles Lellouche) and a charismatic but faithless lobbyist. law (Pierre Niney).
A character at odds with that for which the public had left him in “Black Box”, where he played a young engineer a little asocial in search, once morest all odds, of the truth following an air crash.
However, this role of lobbyist, Pierre Niney absolutely wanted to play it. “We played musical chairs a bit with the roles in this film,” he told AFP, who had initially been chosen to play the role of the environmental cause activist.
“What I like regarding this character is the way he deals with reality, with lies. It is also the essence of life, to come to terms with reality, ”he explains.
This brilliant and calculating character is also a caring husband and father-in-law. A kind of Everyman and above all insists the actor: “someone who exists and whom we surely meet without knowing it in our daily life”, assures the actor.
10 years of small roles
At 32, he already has a solid filmography, crossed by a common thread: eclecticism in media and registers. All in the service of characters with whom the public can identify.
At ease as well in comedy: OSS 117, but also in the series “La Flamme”, “Casting” – with his sidekick François Civil – as in the biopic “Yves Saint Laurent” (2014) by Jalil Lespert – for which he had won the César for best actor – or in “Black Box”.
He plays everything, dares everything, while admitting “preferring to play the roles of very real, normal people”. Beneath a nonchalant exterior, a hardworking temperament and a self-confident actor.
When AFP asks him if he is a hurried and bulimic actor, Pierre Niney replies that he has “a thirst for play”. “I know that we can say that for my age my filmography is already important, but in reality everything was done in a very progressive way”.
“People know it less because they like to have a less nuanced image and say to themselves + oh well, he’s young, it worked right away +. But no, I did ten years of casting, 10 years of small roles and 150 performances at the Comédie-Française to say for only text: “+Madame, here is sir+. You might say that it gave me time to want my job,” he quips.
Youngest resident of the French, whom he left in 2015, does he miss the theater? “The theater yes, the Comédie-Française no”, he replies, without flinching. “I was offered very, very beautiful things at the cinema, including films that took time and it was no longer really compatible with the Comédie-Française. I turned the page”.
AFP
