Noémie Merlant

The model who hated the runway

Noémie Merlant never intended to spend her life in front of a movie camera. Before stepping onto a professional set, she walked the runways in Paris because her looks came before her vocation. But modeling bored her completely, and she decided she preferred to use her voice rather than her body.

In 2011, she landed her first role in L’Orpheline avec en plus un bras en moins. It wasn't an explosive start, and offers didn't pour in right away. She worked in small productions while learning the craft at Cours Florent in the French capital.

Patience is often an underrated ingredient.

Her real breakthrough came with Le Ciel attendra in 2016. She played a teenager recruited by jihadists, and French critics stopped seeing her as just a pretty face. Her César nomination for Most Promising Actress put her name on the casting desks of Europe's most important studios.

The leap into the international market

In 2019, she shot Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Her chemistry with Adèle Haenel, under the direction of Céline Sciamma, produced one of the most celebrated European films of that decade. Merlant won Best Actress at the European Film Awards for this role.

And the gamble paid off.

Merlant decided that acting wasn't enough for her creative ambitions. In 2021, she premiered her feature directorial debut, Mi iubita, mon amour, at the Cannes Film Festival. She shot it on a shoestring budget with a crew made up of close friends in Romania.

In 2022 she appeared in L'Innocent, a comedy directed by Louis Garrel. This role won her the César for Best Supporting Actress after years of nominations in major categories. That same year she made the leap to English-language cinema with Tár.

Sharing the frame with Cate Blanchett required a level of technical restraint that Merlant handled with composure. In this production she played the assistant to a conductor going through a personal freefall.

The Risk of Gore

In 2024, she premiered Les Femmes au balcon, her second feature film as a director. It's a horror comedy with gore elements, co-written with Céline Sciamma. The script moves away from the restraint of her usual dramas and embraces visual excess.

She doesn't seek to please traditional commercial circuits.

That same year (2024), she took the lead role in the new version of Emmanuelle, directed by Audrey Diwan. Filming took place mainly on location in Hong Kong with an international crew. The production had a budget of 15 million euros.