Nassim Lyes, the comic kickboxer Netflix made into France’s action lead

Nassim Lyes

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	June 3, 1988 Nîmes, France
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Le Brio, Under Paris, The Last Mercenary

Xavier Gens wanted a man who said almost nothing. The actor he ended up with, after his first choice dropped out over a scheduling clash, was the one cracking jokes on every set he walked onto. In Farang, the revenge thriller sold to English-speaking markets as Mayhem!, Nassim Lyes plays an ex-convict hiding in Bangkok behind his fists and his silence, and Gens later admitted the silence had not come easily. The distance between the man who makes a room laugh and the body a camera trusts in a fight is the whole of his career so far.

It is also the question his next films have to answer. Lyes has become the face French streaming reaches for when someone has to dive after a shark or stand next to Guillaume Canet in a gunfight, and in between he keeps making loud comedies with his friend Julien Royal. Hollywood has now called. The part it offered him is an immortal.

Lyes is a stage name. Nassim Si Ahmed grew up in Mas de Mingue, a neighbourhood of Nîmes, the second of four brothers in a family whose parents came from Algeria. He was born in the city on 3 June 1988, took the economics track of the baccalauréat, gave law a year, and in 2009 won the French junior kickboxing title in the 67-kilogram class at the Salle Japy in Paris.

By then he was already living in the capital, going to auditions between shifts at a fast-food counter and waiting tables. The director Tristan Aurouet noticed him and gave him one of the leads in Mineurs 27, opposite Jean-Hugues Anglade and Gilles Lellouche, then cast him as Malik in the television series Les Lascars. On the side he was Cokeman, the unhinged stoner of the web series En passant pécho, a character he would carry into Royal’s Netflix film of the same name years later.

The decade that followed filed him under a narrow heading. He was Driss, a young man drawn into a jihadist cell, in Nicolas Boukhrief’s Made in France; Selim in Marseille, the first French series Netflix commissioned; a supporting player opposite Sacha Baron Cohen in The Spy. One 2022 comedy credited him simply as “Racaille #1”. When Pierre Perrier was injured on the eve of filming M6’s Agatha Christie adaptation Ils étaient dix, Lyes was the replacement called in at the last minute.

The way out ran through genre. He played Simyon Novak in The Last Mercenary, David Charhon’s Netflix action comedy built around Jean-Claude Van Damme, and then Gens handed him Farang: a lead, Thai locations, and fight choreography designed around a man who had actually competed. StudioCanal opened it in France at the end of June 2023, in the week riots followed the police killing of Nahel Merzouk, and it still drew about 200,000 admissions in its first month. IFC Films took it to American theatres and on-demand services the following January.

The film that changed his standing was a shark movie. In Under Paris, again for Gens, he plays Adil, the river-police commander who teams up with Bérénice Bejo’s marine scientist while the city prepares to hold a triathlon in the Seine. Netflix released it in June 2024; it posted the best launch the platform had recorded for a non-English-language film, and Variety later put its audience at more than 102 million views. Around it sat two more Netflix titles: Royal’s All-Time High, which cast him as a con man circling Zoé Marchal’s crypto millionaire and climbed to first place on Netflix’s French chart in its second week, pushing David Fincher’s The Killer aside; and Ad Vitam, in which he plays Ben beside Canet.

None of this has made him a critics’ actor. Mayhem! settled at 55 on Metacritic, with reviewers measuring it against Gareth Evans’ The Raid and finding it short; La Libre Belgique called it laboured and schoolbook. Under Paris sits at 64 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes, Ad Vitam at 42. The viewing figures and the reviews describe the same limit from opposite ends. French cinema has no assembly line for action stars, so Lyes has built one around himself inside Netflix’s appetite for French genre exports, working with directors who prize what his body can do over what his face might say. Gens was candid about it: he wanted the Stallone of Rocky or an Eastwood loner, a man trying to stay unseen, and he had cast someone who in life is always telling jokes.

His answer has been to write. Bagarre, which StudioCanal brought to French cinemas on 15 April 2026, is his third film with Royal and one he co-wrote with the director. Lyes plays Naïm, a gentle man in Marseille who signs up with a fighters-for-hire service to pay for his sick dog’s treatment, and he looked to Pierre Richard and Gérard Depardieu in Francis Veber’s comedies for the balance between candour and physical presence. For once, the comic and the fighter share a single character.

The next stretch tests whether that persona travels. In November 2025 The Hollywood Reporter named him in the cast of Chad Stahelski’s Highlander for Amazon MGM, as an Immortal who hunts Henry Cavill’s Connor MacLeod; cameras finally rolled in Scotland in January 2026, after an injury Cavill suffered in rehearsals had pushed the shoot back. In May he was in the south of France reprising Adil in Under Paris 2, now directed by Alexandre Aja, with Bejo back as Sophia. In August Netflix confirmed production on Ad Vitam Eternam, with Lyes returning alongside Canet, Sophie Marceau and Mathieu Amalric.

None of the three has a release date. Under Paris 2 is aimed at 2027, and Highlander is expected in 2027 or 2028. Whichever opens first, Lyes will be somewhere few French actors of his generation have stood: playing a hunter in English for a Hollywood studio and a hero in French for the platform that made him, and finding out which version of him audiences believe.

Tags: actors, Highlander, All-Time High, Julien Royal, Nassim Lyes, Mayhem!