Bérangère Mc Neese

The Obsession With Creative Control

Bérangère Mc Neese didn't wait for the industry to come knocking. She was born in Brussels in 1989, and her first experience acting was purely in commercials. She was only eight years old when she started working in ads, but even then she was looking to understand what happened behind the cameras.

This was no child's play.

In 2011, she appeared in the film La chance de ma vie. It was a small role, but it confirmed that her French-American bilingualism was a real professional asset. Her training was not limited to sets: she decided to study journalism while also auditioning in Paris.

Her move into directing came in 2015 with the short film Le Sommeil des Amazones. Mc Neese was looking for a personal voice that acting alone could not satisfy. She didn't want to be just the face of someone else's story, and that is how she began writing her own scripts.

In 2019, she directed Matriochkas. The short won the Magritte Award for Best Fiction Short Film and put her name on the radar of European producers. The story explored the relationship between a mother and her teenage daughter with a rawness that avoided easy sentimentality.

International recognition stopped being a possibility and became a reality.

Balancing Two Continents

She played Daphné Forestier in the series HPI starting in 2021. The role brought her massive visibility in countries such as France and Spain. The series drew nearly ten million viewers during its first broadcasts in prime time.

But her career did not stop at commercial television. She worked on the Netflix production Rescate en el Mar Rojo in 2019, where she shared the cast with Chris Evans. Despite the scale of the project, she stayed focused on European auteur cinema.

She prefers to shoot in settings where the script carries more weight than the special effects budget. For Mc Neese, directing is an almost sociological process of observation.

In 2023, she joined the cast of the series Des gens bien. It is a dark comedy set on the border between Belgium and France that explores human misery through dry humor. That same year, she worked intensively on developing her first feature film as a director after years of honing her craft in short films.

The fourth season of HPI was shot during 2024 on location in Lille and surrounding areas. The series' international distribution deal covers more than one hundred countries and includes an American adaptation produced by ABC.