MThe same dented nose, the same slightly mocking gaze, the same half-trickster half-childish smile, the same swaying gait… Victor Belmondo multiplies the points in common with his grandfather, the unforgettable Jean-Paul. When these similarities are pointed out to him, the young actor is not offended. Quite the contrary. “I am his grandson. I will not deny this heredity. But we also have a lot of differences,” he simply replies. And the actor to list three of them: “I am much less carefree than him, I do not have his popularity, I still have everything to prove! »
The actor, starring in the new film by Olivier Peyon (the adaptation of the novel by Philippe Besson, Stop with your lies theatrical release on February 22), knows it… its difficulty will be to make a first name. But, as he himself admits: “It is the lot of every generation. And I’m not going to complain about having had Jean-Paul Belmondo as a grandpa. “From this national Bébel, who disappeared on September 6, 2021, the young man born in 1993 says he only keeps magical memories. “When I think of him, images come to me above all from behind the scenes at the Théâtre des Variétés [que son grand-père avait racheté en 1991, NDLR] “, he confides.
A first film at ten years old
Did the taste for gambling also come down to him as a legacy? He doesn’t believe it. “My vocation was born at the communal school of Les Peupliers, in Vaucresson. I liked to clown around in class and my little pleasure has always been the end-of-year show, ”he continues. Victor was 10 years old when an experience gave birth to his vocation as an actor.
“In 2003, my father played the role of a gangster in a short film. Its director, Régis Mardon, was looking for a child to play his son. I did screen tests and it was me who was taken. The few days of filming that followed were an immense pleasure. One scene particularly amuses him. “At one point in the film, the police were raiding our house [il incarnait le fils d’un mafieux yougoslave, NDLR]. During the search, the police ransacked my room and broke my toys. I loved living this moment of raw emotion. »
If his father, Paul, does not persevere in the cinema and becomes a racing driver, the young Victor decides, as for him, to continue in this way. He multiplies acting lessons, begins to watch films compulsively, reads everything about his favorite directors, starting with Martin Scorsese. To reassure his parents who keep telling him that the acting profession is uncertain, he agrees to go to a school specializing in cinema professions, “just to be able to retrain myself in case I don’t break through. During these studies [à l’Esec, NDLR]I gradually oriented myself towards the “screenplay” sector, because I have always been fascinated by the inventors of stories”, he continues.
Hesitant beginnings
He goes on filming as soon as he leaves school. After an appearance in The Very Private Life of Mr. Sim by Michel Leclerc, released in 2015, he won his first (big) role in My baby, by Lisa Azuelos (2018) alongside Sandrine Kiberlain. But strays a little in his next choices by wanting to try popular comedy (All inclusive by Fabien Onteniente), then to the Franchouillard thriller (Versus by Francois Valla). He has to wait until 2020 to find roles that allow him to really prove himself. In the biopic that Gabriel Le Bomin devotes to General de Gaulle, he slips easily into the skin of the resistant Claude Hettier de Boislambert. Then he goes on, in front of Christophe Barratier’s camera, in a melodramatic comedy, Fly Mein 2021.
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It is, however, with Albatross of Xavier Beauvois that Victor confirms that he is much more than the grandson of Jean-Paul Belmondo. In this drama, unfairly shunned by the public on its release, it indeed portrays a young policeman confronted with a series of difficult news items in the Pays de Caux. “A role specially written for him to the point that the character bore his first name, because this boy has a crazy talent”, slips the director who had tested “the way in which he prints the film” on his previous film (The Guardiansin 2017).
The time of maturity
For Olivier Peyon, Victor Belmondo is now exploring a new register… more psychological. In stop with your lies, he thus portrays the son of the former lover of a famous writer, in search of information on his parent. In this delicate role, the young actor shows impressive acting agility. Alternately charming and disturbing, apparently serene before revealing the unfathomable grief that is undermining him, he breathes into his character of Lucas, torn apart by an intimate tragedy, the ambiguity needed to make an impression on the audience.
The actor won’t say anything about how he prepared. “It’s all very instinctive. It’s a story of meeting between a character and an actor, ”he evacuates. Before adding: “The only important question in this matter is whether the sum of the things that constitute us corresponds to the profile of the fictional being that we must make realistic. “A question that Victor Belmondo asks himself, he says, before each day of filming. Including for light roles like the one he currently plays in front of the lens of Emmanuelle Belohradsky. That of an elevator repairman who falls in love with the young woman who called him for help. A romantic comedy where he gives the reply to Galatéa Bellugi.
The young man, who will turn 30 next December, now has two dreams. The first ? Filming in Italy, the country of his mother, Luana Tenca, now a restaurateur who insisted on teaching him her native language. “Italy is all the more important to me because, on my grandfather’s side too, we are from the peninsula,” he slips. (The parents of the sculptor Paul Belmondo, his great-grandfather, are from Piedmont on one side and Sicily on the other, editor’s note). His second dream? Co-direct the film he wrote with Julie Gavras: a story that takes place in a theater and in which the boy says he slipped a lot of personal memories.