Pierre Niney, the chameleon actor who goes from laughter to dramas

These weeks, getting hold of Pierre Niney is proving complicated. Captured by the shooting of Nicolas Bedos’ next film, Masquerade, the 32-year-old actor has little time to spare, even for the promotion of Black Box, Yann Gozlan’s new thriller, in which he plays a feverish analyst from the BEA, the body responsible for investigating air accidents. It is therefore seized on the fly, as is the case to say, during its visit to the Angoulême festival. And rather twice than once since he also defends there Lovers (in theaters November 17), by Nicole Garcia, story of a love triangle with Stacy Martin and Benoît Magimel. Partitions at the antipodes of that of the spy wig eighties styleOSS 117 – Red alert in black Africa, in which it shines with potacherie.

His hoaxes with McFly & Carlito? “The greatest success of my career”

“When I have just shot a comedy, I want to do a drama and vice versa, he explains. Thanks to the theater, I can do both. situation, even if the drama is more permissive than the comedy, where the music of the words and the timing of the actions take precedence. ” His performance in theYves Saint Laurent (2014) by Jalil Lespert, for which he received the César for best actor at only 25, a precocity record, quickly opened the doors to tragicomic alternation. But the former resident of the French (from 2010 to 2015) confesses it: in his beginnings, he felt more able to cheer up the zygomatic than to make people cry. To see him present in a funny and playful way Black Box to the Charente public just before the screening, we understand why.

We noticed his sense of repartee and improvisation during his participation, in January, in the famous McFly & Carlito telephone hoaxes. He was rolling in the flour his mate Gilles Lellouche, to whom he proposed an advertisement for a fake brand of scooter, and the production manager of the next one. Asterix, by selling him the improbable pitch of a superhero movie, Leaf Man, the man who weighs the weight of a leaf … The video has 11 million views on YouTube. “It’s more than any movie I’ve shot, smiles the actor. I still hear about it every day. It will remain the greatest success of my career!”

He would see himself as a preacher

The farce is all the more laughing as his American agents had offered him, a few years ago, to audition for a real superhero role: Spider-Man, that of Jon Watts, released in 2017. “I declined but I would not have had it anyway, he says. Even if I had landed the role in favor of unreal circumstances, he would have had it. I had to sign for several episodes. But I am offered too many beautiful things here. “

In a very different register, he would see himself playing a preacher, like “Tom Cruise in Magnolia or Paul Dano in There Will Be Blood, by Paul Thomas Anderson. “While waiting to one day don Burt Lancaster’s handsome charlatan costume in a new Elmer Gantry (1960), Pierre Niney intends to take a break and develop projects with his production company. The opportunity to write only one on stage, we suggest. “Not a purely comic show but burlesque and poetic, yes, why not one day, he replies. Something between Philippe Caubert and James Thierrée.” Or to direct a first feature film, he who has already signed a short in the form of a comedy with Kafkaesque accents, For the role (2013), with François Civil and Noémie Merlant. “I wrote things, he says, but they are very far from being completed. In any case, it will surely be in that vein. It is my universe.”