Ella Rumpf, the actress cinema keeps discovering for the first time

Ella Rumpf

Photo: Quejaytee / CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	February 4, 1995 Paris, France
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Raw, Marguerite's Theorem, The Divine Order
Awards	César · Lumière · Swiss Film · European Shooting Star, Berlinale

Ella Rumpf’s career contains a strange accounting error. She became a face festival audiences could not shake as the older sister in Julia Ducournau’s Raw, the one who teaches a vegetarian sibling how to bite. Then she spent years being introduced as a discovery: a name on the César academy’s list of révélations, a European Shooting Star at the Berlinale, one of Unifrance’s young talents to watch. When the César for most promising actress finally arrived, it rewarded a performance that looked nothing like the feral girls who had made her known, and it went to an actress who had already worked in four languages. The question her career now asks is what she becomes once the industry stops treating her as new.

Her Swiss father had abandoned civil engineering in Zurich to study philosophy at the Sorbonne, where he met her French mother. The family moved to Zurich soon after their daughter was born in Paris, settling in the Oberstrass district, where her father worked as a psychotherapist. She grew up with Swiss German and French as native languages. At a Steiner school she won the part of Juliet as a young teenager, and soon after the German director Friederike Jehn cast her in Draussen ist Sommer. The experience sent her to London, to the Giles Foreman Centre for Acting.

The first image people kept of the actress, born in Paris on 4 February 1995 and trained in London between 2013 and 2015, was a shaved head. For Simon Jaquemet’s Chrieg she played Ali, a hard, uncontainable teenager, and the part earned her a Swiss Film Award nomination for best supporting actress. In Raw, which won the FIPRESCI prize at Cannes and the Sutherland Trophy in London, she was Alexia, the veterinary student who initiates her sister, played by Garance Marillier, into an appetite neither of them can control. In Jakob Lass’s Tiger Girl, shot under his own FOGMA rules with much of the dialogue improvised, she took the title role: a Berlin woman with a baseball bat and no interest in permission, opposite Maria Dragus. It opened the Berlinale’s Panorama Special. In the same season she played the rebellious Hanna in Petra Volpe’s The Divine Order, Switzerland’s submission to the Academy Awards.

The next phase was about range. In Guillaume de Fontenay’s Sympathy for the Devil, set during the siege of Sarajevo, she played Boba opposite Niels Schneider’s war reporter Paul Marchand; the role brought her an audience prize at the Festival Jean Carmet in Moulins and, in 2020, the European Shooting Star distinction, whose jury praised a chameleon-like versatility. That same year she was Fleur Salomé, a young Hungarian medium, in the Netflix and ORF series Freud, which opened the Berlinale Series section. In Lindenberg! Mach dein Ding she played Susanne, the first love Udo Lindenberg put into his song “Cello”, and in Lorenz Merz’s Soul of a Beast she earned a Swiss Film Award nomination for best actress.

Anglophone television found her too, though always at the edge of the frame. She played the Contessa in two episodes of the third season of Succession, Polina across nine episodes of Tokyo Vice alongside Ansel Elgort and Rachel Keller, and Eurydice in “The Song of Orpheus”, a single episode of the second season of The Sandman.

The turn came in French and in silence. In Anna Novion’s Marguerite’s Theorem, presented at Cannes in 2023, Rumpf plays a doctoral student in mathematics at the École normale supérieure, working on Goldbach’s conjecture under a professor played by Jean-Pierre Darroussin, whose life comes apart when an error surfaces in her thesis. There is no bat, no blood, no shaved head: just a young woman who thinks in proofs and has to learn to live outside them. In 2024 the role won her the César for most promising actress, the Lumière award for best female revelation and the Swiss Film Award for best actress.

That César is also the most revealing thing about how the business has read her. She was already on the academy’s longlist of révélations for Raw, seven years earlier and the prize finally came at 29, after more than a decade of work. The label of promise followed her because her best roles kept arriving in films that were seen as discoveries themselves, debuts and festival titles, rather than in the commercial pictures that confer a settled rank. Her English-language work has not changed that: three series, all supporting parts. And the early run of wild, physical women risked hardening into a type; it took a role built on stillness to show that the intensity was a choice rather than a register.

Since the César she has chosen first-time filmmakers again and again. In Alice Douard’s debut Love Letters, selected for Critics’ Week at Cannes in 2025, she plays Céline, who in 2014, soon after France opened marriage to same-sex couples, must adopt the daughter her wife Nadia, played by Monia Chokri, is carrying, and gather fifteen testimonies to prove she will be a good mother. In Alice Winocour’s Couture, which premiered at Toronto and reached French cinemas in February 2026, she is Angèle, a makeup artist working the Paris fashion week shows who wants to write, the narrator of one of three stories alongside Angelina Jolie and Anyier Anei. Harry Lagoussis’s Greek-Swiss debut Novak cast her as Louise, opposite Zlatko Burić as an ageing neuroscientist.

The most recent of those debuts is Sarah Arnold’s Too Many Beasts, released in France as L’Espèce explosive on 7 October 2026 after a Directors’ Fortnight premiere at Cannes that earned it the Europa Cinemas Label. In a corner of north-eastern France where wild boars have set farmers against hunters, she plays Stéphane, the gendarmerie’s new psychologist, opposite Alexis Manenti’s freshly transferred investigator.

The next release changes scale. Alexandre Smia’s Jupiter, shown out of competition at Venice in September, reaches French cinemas on 18 November 2026: a nuclear-crisis thriller set in the bunker beneath the Élysée, with Denis Ménochet, André Dussollier, Reda Kateb and Dominique Blanc, in which Rumpf plays a diplomatic adviser. Screen Daily found the film tense but short on nuance. After that comes a return to Switzerland by the longest possible route. In October, Variety reported that Andrea Štaka had cast her in Ibicaba: O Paraíso Prometido, an adaptation of Eveline Hasler’s novel about Swiss emigrants on Brazilian coffee plantations, where she will play a single mother who leaves Switzerland in 1855 expecting opportunity, alongside Júlio Andrade and Ana Flávia Cavalcanti. It is a lead in a story of her own country, and nobody will be able to call it a discovery.

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Tags: actors, actresses, Ella Rumpf, Julia Ducournau, Raw, Swiss cinema

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