Théodore Pellerin finds vulnerability a valuable asset in his burgeoning career. The 29-year-old Québécois actor, with his gangly frame and huge eyes, has made a virtue of a quality that Quentin Tarantino recently derided as “weak sauce”. In his latest film, the French character study Nino, Pellerin is magnetic as a gauche, hesitant young Parisian locked out of his apartment for a weekend after a papillomavirus (HPV)-related throat cancer diagnosis. The role has already won him the Louis Roederer Foundation Rising Star Award at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival and the César Award for Best Male Revelation – recognition that his ability to embody fragility is anything but a weakness.
Nino, the debut feature of director Pauline Loquès, follows its protagonist as he negotiates a single weekend in Paris after learning his chemotherapy will make him infertile. His mission, as Pellerin puts it, is “to speak and to ejaculate” – he must freeze his sperm before treatment begins. The film’s odyssey across the city has drawn comparisons to Agnès Varda’s French New Wave classic Cléo de 5 à 7, which also revolved around a cancer diagnosis. But where Cléo sought answers about her mortality, Nino searches desperately for a private place to masturbate. Pellerin explains the character’s predicament at a cellular level: “His throat cancer isn’t insignificant. It’s the part that links the head to the body. There’s a dissociation from the body – a distancing of his emotions. And because it comes from a sexually transmitted disease, his sexuality – a strong life force – is stunted too.”
Loquès, who co-wrote the screenplay with Maud Ameline, recognised in Pellerin a rare quality. “Théodore had this ability to give life to silences,” she says. “They became charged with other dimensions – poetic, mysterious or psychological.” The film was inspired by the death of a family member Loquès identifies only as “Romain”, who died of cancer at 37. She insists Pellerin understood the character better than she did, despite the project’s personal origins. Pellerin, for his part, pointed out that Nino is fundamentally a film about parenthood – a revelation to the director, even though the narrative is thick with parental and quasi-parental encounters, including a role for Mathieu Amalric as an aftershave-proffering stranger, and a biological clock ticking loudly in the background. Loquès, 39, a former television journalist, brings a light touch and an elegantly restrained style to the story, which has been described as a “quietly devastating” and “poignant” drama. The film won the D’Ornato-Valenti Prize at the 2025 Deauville American Film Festival for best French first feature, and received four César nominations, winning Best First Feature Film for Loquès.
That Pellerin can make Nino’s withholding behaviour sympathetic is a testament to his craft. His vulnerability segues into a dangerous neediness in last year’s caustic psychological thriller Lurker, where he played an LA hipster desperate to ingratiate himself with a pop star. Even more strident roles – a loose-cannon apprentice hoodlum in the 2018 Québécois crime film Family First, or the pyramid-scheme proselytiser tutoring Kirsten Dunst in the 2019 TV series On Becoming a God in Central Florida – retain a disarming innocence. Pellerin’s centre of gravity, across languages and genres, always seems to be this same vulnerability.
From a theatre dressing room to the Croisette
Pellerin’s artistic upbringing prepared him for this path. His mother, Marie Chouinard, is a dancer and choreographer; his father, Denis Pellerin, is a painter known for collages using “poor materials”. “I grew up in theatre dressing rooms, with the dancers from my mum’s troupe,” he says. “So the theatrical space was one I loved. It was playful, personal. Being an artist wasn’t necessarily what I always wanted to do when I was young – but it’s never been an impossibility from my perspective.” After attending a secondary school specialising in dramatic arts and training at École Robert-Gravel in Montreal, he landed his first TV series role at 16 in the popular Quebec school drama 30 Vies, followed by a regular part in the series Med from 2015 to 2017.
His breakout came in 2018 with Family First, for which he won the Prix Iris for Revelation of the Year and a Canadian Screen Award for Best Actor. That same year he took the Best Actor award at the Fantasia International Film Festival for his performance in Philippe Lesage’s Genesis. But Pellerin identified English-language roles as the way forward. He learned English and appeared as a teenager struggling with his sexuality in 2017’s Never Steady, Never Still, opposite Shirley Henderson, and played a younger version of Vincent Cassel’s character in Xavier Dolan’s It’s Only the End of the World (2016). He has since sidled around the edges of Hollywood – a brief appearance as one of Joaquin Phoenix’s fantasy sons in Ari Aster’s Beau Is Afraid (2023) – before hitting bigger acclaim with Lurker. His LA drawl in that film is flawless, and he also mastered received pronunciation for his role as a castrato music professor in Tom Ford’s forthcoming 18th-century drama Cry to Heaven, which he recently finished filming. Upcoming projects include Nicole Garcia’s film Milo, co-starring Marion Cotillard.
Pellerin speaks with a distinct Québécois twang that grows more pronounced as an interview goes on. In English roles, he says, “There’s a bit more of an intellectual process to go through, because phrases are constructed in such a way that, for them to have the right sense, consciously or unconsciously, you have to hit the right accents. In French, you don’t have to worry about the rhythm. In English, it’s more pap-a-pap-a-pap-pap-pap.” He moves his hand up and down like a conductor to illustrate the rhythm.
Slow, thorough, and vulnerable on set
Pellerin’s ability to embody vulnerability is not instantaneous. He has spoken of being “slow” to work his way into roles. Loquès elaborates: “He often says, ‘I’m not a great actor but I know how to read a script really well.’ That’s the difference between him and other actors – he’s very strong at doing research upstream. It’s a place of expansion for him. Then he tries to forget it all before coming on set.” For Nino, that research included understanding the director’s personal grief. “I never had the impression of having to force anything, or add a layer of fiction on top of what I was ‘living’ with the other actors,” he says.
The pivotal masturbation scene, which could easily have tipped into farce, became a touching moment of liberation. “It was a bit stressful for Pauline because she didn’t want to sexualise a moment that was really important for the film,” Pellerin notes. “She was a bit uncomfortable talking to me about the scene. We just had to stick close to what we were really saying, and what it represented for the character and the film. I’d just played Karl Lagerfeld’s boyfriend Jacques de Bascher in a TV series, with an orgy scene where I masturbate in a T-shirt. So Nino wasn’t really a big deal.”
The roles that have stayed with him, he says, are those he immersed himself in most deeply. With Family First, he feared he might remain permanently in a sadistic frame of mind. Lurker’s milieu of celebrity leeches and hangers-on took its toll too. “It was a kind of cynicism. The feeling of rejection was very strong, because that’s what the character was going through in every scene.” Nino, however, was a character he didn’t want to let go. “It was more of a return to my life, to frivolity. I wasn’t confronting mortality in the same way. I found it hard: it was like a loss of poetry in my life.”
With his stock rising fast, Pellerin has little time to dwell. But when the interview ends – he has to go at noon sharp – it turns out he is already digging into another character: his own. “Er, I’ve got my therapy session on Zoom now, so that’s what I’ll be doing with my psychologist.” He offers a wry smile and a “merci”, and leaves. Being vulnerable, he has discovered, is a full-time job.