Daphné Patakia, the Greek actress now handed French cinema’s oldest myths

Daphné Patakia

Photo: Les Films Du Losange / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	June 8, 1992 Brussels, Belgium
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Benedetta, Nimic, The Five Devils

In Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta, Bartolomea reaches the convent gate as a girl running from a violent father, and within a few scenes she has pulled Virginie Efira’s visionary nun down off her pedestal. The actress Verhoeven chose for the part had learned French in a classroom in Brussels, and when she first reached Paris she could barely build a sentence in the language she now works in. Daphné Patakia has been playing the stranger in the room ever since: the Greek girl on the road from Istanbul, the switchboard operator at a state unit that chases flying saucers. Her next films hand her roles inside the oldest stories French popular culture owns, which is a different kind of test.

Patakia grew up in Brussels in a household where, as she tells it, everything was Greek. She went to a Greek school, watched the Greek news with her parents in the evening, took traditional dance on Saturdays and spent Sundays acting in plays put on by an amateur company her mother and father had founded with friends. Her parents, civil servants at the European Commission, had fought the colonels’ dictatorship as students. Summers meant the island of Syros, in the Cyclades, and two grandmothers who shared a bedroom and agreed on nothing; one was a royalist, the other a communist who ate Smarties in bed.

She was born in the Belgian capital on 8 June 1992, and the moment she had her school-leaving diploma she flew to Athens to act. Her parents insisted on university. She has said she lasted one day there. She got into the drama school of the National Theatre of Greece, graduated in 2013 and was soon working on stage and in Greek independent cinema, in Yorgos Zois’ Interruption, which premiered in the Orizzonti section at Venice in 2015, and in Constantine Giannaris’ Spring Awakening. The money was not there. Greek shoots of those years, she told Libération, ran on a friend’s car, sandwiches made by somebody’s parents and the actors’ own clothes, and she remembers painting sets herself to save time.

In 2016 European Film Promotion picked her as Greece’s entry among its Shooting Stars at the Berlinale, and the jury singled out “her air of mystery and her willingness to express extreme emotions in astonishing ways.” She was already on her way out. The crisis and an appetite for cinema took her to Paris at 23, with a French she describes as a catastrophe of vocabulary and syntax. She knew nobody, haunted the art-house screens of the Latin Quarter and turned down stage work at Epidaurus rather than go home. “At the beginning it was very hard,” she said later. “I thought I would have to go back to Greece and do odd jobs.”

Tony Gatlif opened the door. He gave her the title role in Djam, a road movie between Greece and Turkey carried by rebetiko songs, which screened at Cannes in 2017 and which Screen Daily called a formidable showcase for its lead. Canal+ cast her as Eleanor of Austria in Versailles, and Yorgos Lanthimos used her in his short Nimic.

Benedetta, in competition at Cannes in 2021, changed the scale. “I would have said yes to anything Paul Verhoeven proposed to me,” she told The Digital Fix. She read Bartolomea as “very earthy,” the one woman in the convent who “really knows what she wants, and is free,” and the performance brought her a Lumière nomination for most promising actress. The same year she became Véra Clouseau in Antony Cordier’s OVNI(s), a Canal+ comedy about a state unit investigating UFO sightings at the end of the 1970s. Cordier said he fell in love with her phrasing: because French is not her first language she sounds every syllable, and she plays so fast, all breaks and swerves, that the result belongs to nobody else. On set, he added, she was the only one everybody called by her character’s name.

The same accent that made Véra can also work as a fence. Much of her French work since has gone to women who do not fit the room they are in, like Mimi in Marie Garel-Weiss’ Sur la branche, a bipolar woman just out of hospital who drags Benoît Poelvoorde’s burnt-out lawyer into defending a small-time con man. She has admitted that improvising in French opposite a free-wheeler like Poelvoorde is a risk for her. When she stepped into a broader commercial frame the result was rough: Houda Benyamina’s All for One, a female rewrite of The Three Musketeers in which she played Aramitz, was poorly received by critics and audiences alike when it opened in January 2025. And Patakia herself undercuts the image of the wild card. “I have the impression of being rather boring,” she told Cinéserie. Films, she said, are where she tries the things she does not dare to do in real life.

The last two years have pulled the range wider. In Vasilis Kekatos’ Our Wildest Days, which premiered in the Berlinale’s Generation 14plus section in February 2025, she leads as Chloe, a young woman who leaves Athens and falls in with a group of young people. In Cédric Jimenez’s Dog 51, the dystopian thriller with Gilles Lellouche that premiered at Venice and opened in France in October 2025, she plays Amel and shares the screen again with Adèle Exarchopoulos, her co-star in Léa Mysius’ The Five Devils.

What comes next puts her inside French myth itself. On 27 November 2026 Netflix releases The Hunchback, Soul of Paris (Quasimodo, l’âme de Paris), Jean-François Richet’s film about the man said to have inspired Victor Hugo, set in a Paris threatened by cholera in 1830, with Vincent Cassel as the hunchbacked stonemason and Patakia as Agnès, a character reported to be a version of Esmeralda. She also plays Marylou, the ambitious young executive sent to help Franck Dubosc’s star pharmaceutical salesman in Mathieu Sapin’s comedy Le Teckel, and Lady Maud Beltham, a figure from Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain’s original novels, in Frédéric Tellier’s Fantômas – Le nouveau monde, with Guillaume Canet as the faceless criminal and Romain Duris as Inspector Juve, due in cinemas on 10 February 2027.

Esmeralda was the woman Hugo’s Paris could never place, and Lady Beltham is the one who chooses the criminal over her own class. Both are outsiders by design, which may be exactly why they went to her. Within three months, audiences will have seen Patakia opposite Cassel on Netflix and opposite Canet on the big screen, and the question for her next decade is whether the phrasing Cordier fell for can survive inside French cinema’s grandest costumes.

Featured Films

Tags: actors, actresses, French cinema, Vincent Cassel, Paul Verhoeven, The Hunchback, Soul of Paris

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