Reza Rahadian, the actor Indonesia never stops casting, steps out of the frame

Reza Rahadian

Photo: Netmediatama / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	March 5, 1987 Bogor, Indonesia
Occupation	Actor and film director
Known for	Sri Asih, 24 Hours with Gaspar, Grave Torture
Awards	3 Citra

Indonesian moviegoers have a running joke about him, repeated often enough that newspapers now use it in headlines: “Reza lagi, Reza lagi.” Reza again. Scan the posters outside a Jakarta multiplex in almost any month and Reza Rahadian is likely to be on one of them. He is the most nominated leading man in the history of the Citra Awards, Indonesia’s national film prizes, and the one who has won Best Actor most often. Yet the film that has done the most for his name abroad is one in which he never appears. For Pangku, his first feature as a director, he handed the screen to Claresta Taufan, Fedi Nuril and Christine Hakim and stayed on the other side of the lens.

His name is itself a family record. Rahadian joins the names of his parents: Abdul Rahim, a Persian man from Iran, and Pratiwi Widantini Matulessy, a woman of Ambonese descent whose family name he carries in full as Reza Rahadian Matulessy. The couple separated when their son was six months old. He grew up with his mother as a single parent in Bogor, in West Java, where he was born. She was Christian and he became Muslim, and she taught him to keep respect between faiths inside the house. Her love of cinema reached him long before any training did.

The boy, born on 5 March 1987, did theatre at junior high school, worked as an extra on the soap Bidadari and, in 2004, won the Favorite Top Guest title from the youth magazine Aneka Yess!. He treated modelling as a way into acting rather than a career, and it got him soap opera roles, then a film debut in 2007 with the horror comedy Film Horor.

The turn came with Hanung Bramantyo’s Perempuan Berkalung Sorban in 2009. Rahadian auditioned for a small part and Bramantyo cast him instead as Samsuddin, the violent, polygamous husband of the heroine, a role most young actors with a fan base would have refused. It won him the Citra for Best Supporting Actor. A year later he took Best Actor for Benni Setiawan’s 3 Hati Dua Dunia Satu Cinta, an interfaith romance that echoed the household he grew up in. He played a dolphin researcher in Kamila Andini’s Laut Bercermin (The Mirror Never Lies) and lost ten kilos for Brokenhearts.

Then came the role that fixed his public image. In Faozan Rizal’s Habibie & Ainun, released at the end of 2012, he played B. J. Habibie, the engineer who became Indonesia’s third president, opposite Bunga Citra Lestari. The Jakarta Post’s reviewer singled out how completely he took on Habibie’s voice and mannerisms, and the part brought his third Citra in 2013. After that, Indonesian cinema kept calling him whenever it needed a national figure: the title role in Garin Nugroho’s Guru Bangsa: Tjokroaminoto, Kartini’s brother Kartono in Kartini, the young Habibie again in the prequel Rudy Habibie. In between he played the impossible employer of the office comedy My Stupid Boss, which brought him Best Actor in 2016.

The joke about his ubiquity carries a real complaint: an industry whose pool of leading actors has grown fast keeps returning to one face for presidents, heroes, cheating husbands and horror leads. Rahadian holds a Citra record for being nominated twice in the same Best Actor category in four different years, and twice he lost, as if splitting his own vote: in 2015, nominated for both Kapan Kawin? and Guru Bangsa: Tjokroaminoto, he watched Deddy Sutomo win. He played a supporting part in Edwin’s Seperti Dendam, Rindu Harus Dibayar Tuntas, which won the Golden Leopard at Locarno in 2021, and in the same season became Aris, the unfaithful husband at the centre of the streaming melodrama Layangan Putus. A screen persona that fits a festival winner and a weekly soap equally well can look less like range than like a lack of saying no.

Between 2021 and 2023 he chaired the committee of the Festival Film Indonesia, the body behind the Citras, and when the term ended he declined to run again, saying three years was enough. In 2023 he won his fourth Best Actor award for Berbalas Kejam, which broke his tie with Deddy Mizwar and Sukarno M. Noor as the category’s most decorated winner, and in 2024 he led Joko Anwar’s horror film Siksa Kubur.

Pangku came from something he saw while working. Filming along the Pantura coast road in 2020, he noticed the kopi pangku stalls, roadside coffee shops where waitresses sit on male customers’ laps. He wrote the script with Felix K. Nesi and set it during the economic crisis of 1998, around a young mother who takes that job to keep her family afloat. The film premiered in the Vision – Asia section of the Busan International Film Festival in September 2025 and won four prizes there, among them the audience award and the FIPRESCI critics’ award. At the 2025 Festival Film Indonesia it took four Citras, including Best Picture, Best Supporting Actress for Christine Hakim and Best Original Screenplay for Rahadian and Nesi. It was the sixth Citra of his career and the first that had nothing to do with his face.

His recent work runs on both tracks. At Cannes in May 2026, Annisa, a short about a blind teenage girl that he co-directed with Filipino filmmaker Sam Manacsa, premiered in the Critics’ Week Next Step Studio programme. The same year he starred opposite Luna Maya in the horror film Suzzanna: Santet Dosa di Atas Dosa and in Baim Wong’s family drama Semua Akan Baik-Baik Saja.

His biggest role of the year is the one he is promoting now. In Yosep Anggi Noen’s Laut Bercerita (The Sea Speaks His Name), adapted from Leila S. Chudori’s novel, he plays Biru Laut, a student activist who disappears in the last years of the New Order, and the film follows the family that keeps looking for him. Rahadian is also an executive producer. It had its world premiere in the main competition at Busan on 11 October 2026, closes Jakarta Film Week on 25 October and opens in Indonesian cinemas on 29 October.

The next film he directs is already moving. In Busan in October 2026 his project Casparina won the CJ ENM Award at the Asian Project Market, where the jury described it as a family drama built from the director’s most personal story. Audiences who say “Reza lagi” may soon have to decide whether that still counts when the name is in the credits rather than on the poster.

Featured Films

Tags: actors, Reza Rahadian, Christine Hakim, Habibie & Ainun, Laut Bercerita, Layangan Putus

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