Noémie Merlant, the actress who keeps moving to the other side of the lens

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	November 27, 1988 Paris, France
Occupation	actress, director
Known for	Portrait of a Lady on Fire, TÁR, Lee
Awards	3 César · Lumière

The role that made Noémie Merlant known outside France required her to stare. In Céline Sciamma’s Portrait de la jeune fille en feu, she plays Marianne, a painter hired to capture the likeness of a young noblewoman — and the entire film rests on the ethics of that gaze: who looks, who authorizes it, what happens when the looked-at looks back. For an actress who had spent a decade being photographed, the role was not accidental.

She was born in Paris in 1988 and grew up in Rezé, a town across the Loire from Nantes, where both her parents worked in real estate. Before acting school, she modeled — a career that took her across several countries and gave her an acute awareness of what it means to be a subject. She trained at the Cours Florent in Paris and made her film debut in 2008.

The breakthrough came eight years later. In Le ciel attendra, a 2016 drama about a teenage girl drawn toward jihadist radicalization, Merlant played Sonia with a precision that earned her a César nomination for Most Promising Actress. The film was discussed primarily in the context of French anxieties about domestic radicalization, but Merlant’s performance did something more specific: it showed a young woman seeking intensity and meaning in the only available direction the narrative left open. The political reading was unavoidable; the psychological one was what remained after the credits.

Portrait de la jeune fille en feu arrived in 2019 and remade her career in one stroke. Co-starring with Adèle Haenel under Sciamma’s direction, the film premiered at Cannes and won the Best Screenplay prize and the Queer Palm. Merlant won the Lumière Award for Best Actress and received a César nomination for Best Actress. The film’s distribution spread across Europe and North America, and it landed her in conversations about the next generation of French cinema. It also presented a problem: how do you follow a performance that is entirely about vision and desire without spending the next decade being asked to recreate it?

The answer she chose was lateral movement. In 2022, L’Innocent, a breezy crime comedy directed by Louis Garrel, gave her a different register entirely — broad, physical, comic — and it worked: the César jury awarded her Best Supporting Actress. In the same year, Todd Field cast her as Francesca Lentini in Tár, opposite Cate Blanchett; it was her first American production, and she brought a stillness to the role that refused to become decoration within Blanchett’s controlled performance. The combination of those two films in a single calendar year clarified something about her range that a single landmark film had obscured.

The critical tension in Merlant’s trajectory is the double bind her international profile creates. Her most celebrated work was built on an argument about the male gaze and its alternatives; her subsequent high-profile commercial casting — Emmanuelle (2024), a reboot of a franchise historically associated with female objectification — invited accusations of contradiction. Merlant and director Audrey Diwan framed the film as reclamation, and the 2024 version was aimed at rewriting the terms of the original. Whether that argument fully persuaded audiences was a different matter. The tension between her critical positioning and her commercial choices has not resolved, and there is no sign she is trying to resolve it.

She has also become a filmmaker. Her feature directorial debut, Mi Iubita Mon Amour, screened in Cannes Special Screenings in 2021. Her second film, Les femmes au balcon — released internationally as The Balconettes — premiered in the Midnight Screenings section at Cannes 2024. Co-written with Sciamma, it is a genre-inflected horror-comedy that places three women in a Marseille apartment during a heatwave and turns the question of who controls the building’s external space into a bloody escalation. Its genre choices were more divisive than her acting work; the film’s intentions were legible but not always subtle.

In May 2026, she was at Cannes again — this time in Roma Elastica, Bertrand Mandico’s tribute to Italian cinema of the 1980s, playing Valentina opposite Marion Cotillard. The film screened at midnight, as Mandico’s work tends to, and generated the particular enthusiastic bewilderment that greets his films.

Later in 2026, she appears in a new adaptation of Les Misérables alongside Vincent Lindon and Tahar Rahim, directed by Fred Cavayé, due in October. And she is set to work with Arnaud Desplechin on The Thing That Hurts, alongside Golshifteh Farahani and Felicity Jones — a director whose interest in characters who argue with their own desires seems well matched to what Merlant has been building across a decade.