Laura Sépul

Inspector Muller's Instinct

Laura Sépul reached a wide European audience with a tired face and a Belgian police badge in hand. She was 2016, and the series Ennemi Public was looking for something other than the typical textbook heroine. She brought a dryness that threw casting directors off during the first auditions.

Her training at the Institut des Arts de Diffusion (IAD) in Louvain-la-Neuve gave her the tools to understand that silence says more than a scream. During her first professional years, she alternated stage work with supporting roles that barely covered her bills in Brussels. But that period of anonymity sharpened her ability to read the psychology of complex characters without relying on tricks.

And then the Belgian market became too small for her.

In 2016, the success of the first season of Ennemi Public put her on the radar of international co-productions. French critics began comparing her to the actresses of Nordic noir for her restraint. And that's the thing: Sépul doesn't try to please the camera. Her work as Chloé Muller moved away from polished aesthetics to focus on an almost pathological obsession with the criminal case.

The Production Company That Didn't Want to Wait

In 2018, she decided that waiting for the phone to ring was a losing strategy. She founded the production company The Lab with other industry professionals to create her own stories and keep control over the creative process. Sépul quickly understood that in the European industry, autonomy is the only way forward to avoid being typecast as the suffering mother or wife.

Acting isn't always enough to satisfy the creative hunger of someone who analyzes scripts from the standpoint of structure. This producing side of her career helped her navigate industry changes better when streaming platforms took off strongly in the Benelux.

The gamble paid off.

In 2020, she appeared in Into the Night, the first original Belgian series for a global platform. She played Chloe, a military nurse trapped on a plane fleeing the sun. It was a technical, claustrophobic shoot that demanded constant physical precision. There was no room for dramatic improvisation here, since pure suspense set the pace.

The Leap into the French-Speaking Market

By 2022, her presence on French-language television was a steady fixture. In the series Pandore, she played an investigative journalist, a role that allowed her to explore the underbelly of politics and the Belgian justice system. The show performed well in the ratings and confirmed that her name helped sell projects beyond its original borders.

But Sépul always returns to comedy when drama becomes too heavy. In 2021, she joined the cast of Baraki, a production that pokes fun at stereotypes of the working class in Wallonia. Switching from a tormented inspector to a social worker in a dark comedy takes a mental discipline that few actors maintain after a decade in the business.

In 2023, she shot the second season of Baraki with the same technical and artistic crew. The production drew more than two million views on RTBF's platform before its international distribution. Filming of the final episodes took a total of forty-two effective working days on location.