Benoît Poelvoorde

Born in Namur, Belgium, Benoît Poelvoorde has established himself in the Franco-Belgian scene as an actor, screenwriter, director and comedian, with a style marked by absurdity, offbeatness and a strong tension between comedy and unease. His trajectory takes a turn in 1992 with C'est arrivé près de chez vous, co-directed with Rémy Belvaux and André Bonzel, a black-and-white mockumentary that became a landmark of Belgian cinema in the 1990s. After a spell in café-theatre and television with Jamais, au grand jamais and then Les Carnets de monsieur Manatane in 1997, Poelvoorde goes on to star in films ranging from popular comedies to more singular works, from Les Randonneurs (1997) to Le Vélo de Ghislain Lambert (2001), Le Boulet (2002) and Podium (2004). Over the years, Poelvoorde broadens his range to dramatic or melancholic films such as Entre ses mains (2005), Coco avant Chanel (2009), L'Autre Dumas (2010) or Trois Cœurs (2014), while continuing to work on offbeat comedies with Gustave Kervern, Benoît Delépine or Quentin Dupieux, notably Le Grand Soir (2012), Saint Amour (2016), Au poste! (2018) and Fumer fait tousser (2022). He is also present in ensemble productions such as Le Grand Bain (2018), Poelvoorde has, for over thirty years, alternated between auteur cinema, broad-audience comedy, television and voice work, in a particularly dense career spanning Belgium and France.