\n<\/p>\n
J<\/span>ust six months after the world rallied to defend poor Paul Dano, vulnerability may now be a hot commodity for an actor. What is \u201cweak sauce\u201d for Quentin Tarantino, who attacked Dano, can be mighty savoury for others. So it\u2019s good timing that Th\u00e9odore Pellerin, with his gangly frame and huge eyes, exudes that quality in the new French character study Nino. Gauche, hesitant and withholding, Pellerin is magnetic as a young Parisian locked out of his apartment for a weekend after a papillomavirus (HPV)-related cancer diagnosis.<\/p>\n Pellerin explains Nino\u2019s predicament, his inability to be candid with his loved ones, almost down to the cellular level. \u201cHis throat cancer isn\u2019t insignificant,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s the part that links the head to the body. There\u2019s a dissociation from the body \u2013 a distancing of his emotions. And because it comes from a sexually transmitted disease, his sexuality \u2013 a strong life force \u2013 is stunted too. So his mission is to speak and to ejaculate.\u201d Urgently in the case of the latter: Nino must freeze his sperm as his treatment will make him infertile. His odyssey around Paris is the gen Z answer to French New Wave classic Cl\u00e9o de 5 \u00e0 7, which also revolved around a cancer diagnosis. Only this time, it\u2019s about the impossibility of finding a good place to masturbate.<\/p>\n Reeling off his character\u2019s diagnosis with cool self-assurance via a Zoom call from his home in Montr\u00e9al, Canada, Pellerin doesn\u2019t seem vulnerable in real life. Plaid shirt rolled up his forearms, with cropped brown hair and tidy oval glasses, he has the brisk air of a business student between lectures. He is actually between projects, waiting for a new shoot to begin in August having recently finished Tom Ford\u2019s 18th-century drama Cry to Heaven.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n His stock is rising fast, thanks not just to Nino but also to last year\u2019s caustic psychological thriller Lurker, in which he played a parasocial LA hipster desperate to ingratiate himself with a pop star. In that film his vulnerability segues into a dangerous neediness, but it always seems to remain Pellerin\u2019s centre of gravity. Even more strident roles \u2013 like a loose-cannon apprentice hoodlum in the 2018 Qu\u00e9b\u00e9cois crime film Family First, or the pyramid-scheme proselytiser tutoring Kirsten Dunst in the 2019 TV series On Becoming a God in Central Florida \u2013 have a disarming innocence.<\/p>\n Nino director Pauline Loqu\u00e8s, who also co-wrote the script, recognised that Pellerin has a particular quality. \u201cTh\u00e9odore had this ability to give life to silences,\u201d she says. \u201cThey became charged with other dimensions \u2013 poetic, mysterious or psychological.\u201d She insists that he understood the character she created better than her \u2013 quite a feat considering this was a very personal project, drawn from her outrage at the death from cancer, aged 37, of a family member she will only identify as \u201cRomain\u201d.<\/p>\n Pellerin pointed out that Nino is fundamentally a film about parenthood \u2013 which came as news to Loqu\u00e8s, despite the number of parental or quasi-parental encounters (including an aftershave-proffering Mathieu Amalric), and the suddenly accelerated biological clock ticking in the background. Loqu\u00e8s, 39, used to be a journalist. Did Pellerin feel there was any risk in signing up for her first foray into directing? Au contraire: \u201cPlenty of big directors make really bad films. And if you write a magnificent screenplay, the film will be great \u2013 because you\u2019re close to your subject, you\u2019ve mastered it.\u201d<\/p>\n He goes on: \u201cI never had the impression of having to force anything, or add a layer of fiction on top of what I was \u2018living\u2019 with the other actors.\u201d Maybe this ambience was what allowed him to succeed with the pivotal masturbation scene. It would have been easy to overdo it, or hit an unfortunate comic note, instead of making it a touching moment of liberation.<\/p>\n <\/span>Hit the right note \u2026 Pellerin and Pauline Loqu\u00e8s at the C\u00e9sar awards in February. <\/span> Photograph: Lyvans Boolaky\/WireImage<\/p>\n \u201cIt was a bit stressful for Pauline because she didn\u2019t want to sexualise a moment that was really important for the film,\u201d says Pellerin. \u201cShe was a bit uncomfortable talking to me about the scene. We just had to stick close to what we were really saying, and what it represented for the character and the film. I\u2019d just played Karl Lagerfeld\u2019s boyfriend Jacques de Bascher in a TV series, with an orgy scene where I masturbate in a T-shirt. So Nino wasn\u2019t really a big deal.\u201d<\/p>\n If Pellerin talks like someone seasoned, it\u2019s because he got off to a quick start, spurred on artistically by both sides of the family. His mother, Marie, is a choreographer; his father, Denis, a painter. After attending a secondary school that specialised in dramatic arts, he starred in his first TV series, the popular school drama 30 Vies, aged 16. \u201cI grew up in theatre dressing rooms, with the dancers from my mum\u2019s troupe. So the theatrical space was one I loved. It was playful, personal. Being an artist wasn\u2019t necessarily what I always wanted to do when I was young \u2013 but it\u2019s never been an impossibility from my perspective.\u201d<\/p>\n Pellerin is speaking to me in French, his Qu\u00e9b\u00e9cois twang growing as the interview goes on. He quickly racked up credits in his native tongue, playing a younger version of Vincent Cassel\u2019s character in Xavier Dolan\u2019s It\u2019s Only the End of the World in 2016, and a highly annoying little brother and possibly mentally ill street tough in Family First. But he identified English-language roles as the way forward in his career, and learned the language to appear as a teenager struggling with his sexuality in 2017\u2019s Never Steady, Never Still, opposite Shirley Henderson.<\/p>\n Sidling around the edges of Hollywood, with a brief appearance as one of Joaquin Phoenix\u2019s fantasy sons in Ari Aster\u2019s Beau Is Afraid, Pellerin hit on bigger acclaim with Lurker. His LA drawl in the film is flawless \u2013 and the same is likely to be true of the RP he had to master as a castrato music professor in Cry to Heaven. In anglophone roles, he says, it\u2019s all a question of rhythm: \u201cThere\u2019s a bit more of an intellectual process to go through with English, because phrases are constructed in such a way that, for them to have the right sense, consciously or unconsciously, you have to hit the right accents. In French, you don\u2019t have to worry about the rhythm. In English, it\u2019s more pap-a-pap-a-pap-pap-pap.\u201d His hand vaults up and down an imaginary score, like a conductor\u2019s.<\/p>\n <\/span>Perfect style \u2026 with Daniel Br\u00fchl, left, Pellerin is landing leading roles in both languages now, but he needs time to work his way fully into them \u2013 he has spoken in the past of being slow. Loqu\u00e8s elaborates: \u201cHe often says, \u2018I\u2019m not a great actor but I know how to read a script really well.\u2019 That\u2019s the difference between him and other actors \u2013 he\u2019s very strong at doing research upstream. It\u2019s a place of expansion for him. Then he tries to forget it all before coming on set.\u201d<\/p>\n The roles that have stayed with him are the ones he went to town on, unsurprisingly. With Family First, he feared he might remain permanently in a sadistic frame of mind, while Lurker\u2019s milieu of celebrity leeches and hangers-on took its toll too. \u201cIt was a kind of cynicism. The feeling of rejection was very strong, because that\u2019s what the character was going through in every scene.\u201d Nino, however, was a character he didn\u2019t want to let go. \u201cIt was more of a return to my life, to frivolity. I wasn\u2019t confronting mortality in the same way. I found it hard: it was like a loss of poetry in my life.\u201d<\/p>\n The way Pellerin is going, though, there will soon be other characters to mine. I want to ask if he is already slipping into someone else\u2019s skin, upstream of this August shoot \u2013 but we\u2019re out of time. He has already told me he has to go at noon sharp. It turns out he is<\/em> digging into a character, though: his own. \u201cEr, I\u2019ve got my therapy session on Zoom now, so that\u2019s what I\u2019ll be doing with my psychologist.\u201d And with a wry smile and a \u201cmerci\u201d, he\u2019s gone. Being vulnerable is a full-time job.<\/p>\n Nino opens in UK cinemas on 19 June<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Just six months after the world rallied to defend poor Paul Dano, vulnerability may now be a hot commodity for an actor. What is \u201cweak sauce\u201d for Quentin Tarantino, who attacked Dano, can be mighty savoury for others. So it\u2019s good timing that Th\u00e9odore Pellerin, with his gangly frame and huge eyes, exudes that quality<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":50460,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[1285,5821,696,1171,24798,1394,8130,24799,2664,1949,22735,6843],"class_list":{"0":"post-50459","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health","8":"tag-big","9":"tag-challenges","10":"tag-deal","11":"tag-film","12":"tag-masturbation","13":"tag-movies","14":"tag-ninos","15":"tag-pellerin","16":"tag-scene","17":"tag-tackling","18":"tag-theodore","19":"tag-wasnt"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50459","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=50459"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50459\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/50460"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50459"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50459"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50459"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
in Becoming Karl Lagerfeld.<\/span> Photograph: Caroline Dubois – Jour Premier\/Disney<\/p>\n