Souheila Yacoub, the gymnast who outgrew her coaches to lead Evil Dead Burn

Souheila Yacoub

Photo: ManoSolo13241324 / CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	June 29, 1992 Geneva, Switzerland
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Dune: Part Two, Evil Dead Burn, Climax
Awards	European Shooting Star, Berlin International Film Festival · Prix Suzanne-Bianchetti, SACD

At one audition in Paris, a filmmaker asked Souheila Yacoub whether she could be “a tiny bit more Arab.” Sébastien Vaniček cast her as the lead of Evil Dead Burn for a different reason entirely: the physical nerve of a former elite athlete who could crawl, fall and fight through a shoot so punishing that one of her stunt doubles broke four ribs. Both choices come down to who decides what an actress’s face and body are for. Yacoub spent her adolescence in a system that made that decision for her, and her career since has been a slow effort to take it back.

She grew up in Geneva, the younger daughter of a Tunisian father and a Flemish Belgian mother who had settled in Switzerland, and she speaks French, Dutch, German and English. At four she followed her older sister, Inès, into rhythmic gymnastics. Within a few years she was training at the federal sports centre in Macolin with the Swiss national team, under Bulgarian coaches, and competing at two World Championships. She left school at sixteen. The target was the London Olympics, and when Switzerland failed to qualify she quit the sport altogether.

She has been blunt about those years. “When I trained at Macolin, we were under the coaches’ hold,” she told Paris Match in 2021, describing life “like a robot” and asking whether it was normal to lock a child in a room because she had gained 300 grams. To Numéro she later said she had been anorexic and bulimic, and that the gymnasts took legal action over food-related abuse and psychological harassment once she stopped. When the Magglingen Protocols exposed abuse at the national centre in 2020, she did not testify formally but publicly backed her former teammates. Still, without that past, she told Paris Match, she would be “a different actress.”

The second life began almost by accident. Yacoub, whose birthday is 29 June 1992, was twenty and unsure what came next when her sister suggested Miss Suisse romande. She won it in Geneva in December 2012, and a Swiss scholarship took her to the Cours Florent in Paris and then to the Conservatoire national supérieur d’art dramatique. After six episodes of Plus belle la vie, the stage gave her the part she still calls her best: Wahida in Wajdi Mouawad’s Tous des oiseaux at the Théâtre national de la Colline, with a monologue of nearly ten minutes about being an Arab woman today, shouted at the audience. “It was intense. My most beautiful role.”

Gaspar Noé’s Climax was her first major screen role. Noé shot it in fifteen days, largely improvised, with a cast made up almost entirely of dancers; she and Sofia Boutella were the only performers with acting experience, and Yacoub played Lou, the dancer the drugged troupe turns on. French auteurs followed. Philippe Garrel cast her in Le Sel des larmes, which premiered at the Berlinale, and the Arte and Hulu series No Man’s Land made her Sarya, an officer in the all-female Kurdish YPJ unit fighting in Syria. In 2021 she had two films in the Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes, Entre les vagues and De bas étage, and the following February the Berlinale presented her as Switzerland’s European Shooting Star.

The CV hides a complaint. “I realised that, for some people, I was an Arab before I was an actress,” she told Numéro. Arriving in France, she wanted to play Juliet, Petra von Kant and Eva Perón, and was advised to work on texts about identity. The roles that came often orbited someone else’s story; reviewing No Man’s Land, The Spool noted that she “rarely gets to hold the limelight.” Cédric Kahn’s Making Of came close to a joke at her expense, casting her as Nadia, a young actress who lands her first big part and watches the male star rewrite the script to shrink it. Her position is not a simple refusal of identity roles. The monologue she calls her finest was about exactly that subject, and she says being Arab is part of who she is. What she rejects is being cast as a quota: “I choose roles because they are close to my emotions, not because I have to embody diversity.”

The year that changed her standing was 2024. In Dune: Part Two, Denis Villeneuve cast her as Shishakli, a Fremen sandworm rider written as a man in Frank Herbert‘s novel; she says she remembers nothing of their first Zoom call because she blacked out. Noémie Merlant‘s Les Femmes au balcon, released in English as The Balconettes, played the Cannes Midnight Screenings with Yacoub as Ruby, a cam performer who takes revenge on a man who assaults her. Aude Léa Rapin’s Planète B, opposite Adèle Exarchopoulos, earned her a César nomination for best female newcomer, and the SACD gave her its Prix Suzanne-Bianchetti. In November 2025 she played Lilith in Lotfy Nathan’s The Carpenter’s Son, alongside Nicolas Cage.

Evil Dead Burn is the first studio franchise film built around her. Produced by Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert and shot over more than three months in New Zealand, it casts her as Alice, a widow who joins her in-laws after her husband’s funeral and slowly recovers the memory of the abuse the family chose not to see. “Being a gymnast for sure helped me to find comfort in very uncomfortable positions,” she told Fangoria. She wanted Alice frightened and clumsy with a weapon, “a survivor but not a superhero.” Warner Bros. released it in the United States on 10 July 2026, and it grossed $72.4 million worldwide on a $20 million budget. Le Nouvel Obs called her a “very convincing post-#MeToo scream queen.” The film sells her stamina as spectacle, yet its ending belongs to a woman refusing the man who hurt her, and Yacoub’s stated hope for Alice is that “she will be able to say no.”

The next part is one she was long told she could not play. In L’Âge d’Or, the first feature Bérenger Thouin spent ten years carrying, she is Jeanne Lavaur, a butcher’s daughter who dreams of becoming a countess and crosses the twentieth century beside Vassili Schneider. Thouin built the film around restored family footage and Gaumont-Pathé newsreels, shooting short scenes to fit images that already existed. “The real challenge was making people believe that these archive figures were becoming our scene partners,” she told Numéro, adding that she had often heard she was “too modern” for a period role. The film premiered in Cannes Classics in May, and Pyramide releases it in French cinemas on 11 November 2026.