A transatlantic career
Hollywood has kept Omar Sy busy. But for ‘Samba,’ the French actor went home.
French actor Omar Sy decided to take a “step back” after the international success of the 2011 comedydrama “The Intouchables.”
Sy became the first actor of African descent to win the César Award, France’s equivalent of the Oscar, for best actor for his charming performance in the film as Driss, a fun-loving young man from the Parisian projects who is hired to care for a wealthy quadriplegic.
“I wanted to take a distance,” explained Sy, who prior to the film had been in the French comedy duo Omar and Fred. “I wanted to spend a year with my family because I worked a lot the previous two years. We chose L.A. because we used to come here for vacation. We put the kids in school for a year. We were so happy. We started to learn English, and we decided to stay.”
After his year off, Sy hit the ground running. “Something big happened,” he said of “The Intouchables,” which was seen by approximately 51 million people worldwide and grossed $426 million, making it the most successful French film in cinema history.
“I am really glad and happy and proud,” said the engaging 37-year-old Sy in an interview earlier this week in Beverly Hills. “I just try to enjoy and live the moment now.”
Since “Intouchables,” Sy has appeared in 2014’s “XMen: Days of Future Past” and was a dinosaur wrangler in this year’s blockbuster “Jurassic World.”
Sy also returned to France to make “Samba,” which opens Friday. The film, which costars Charlotte Gainsbourg, reunites Sy with the “Intouchables” directing duo of Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano.
Sy plays the sweetly shy Samba, an illegal Senegalese immigrant in Paris who has stayed under the government radar for a decade. When Samba is hit with an order to leave France immediately, he finds an unlikely ally and even unlikelier romance with Alice (Gainsbourg), a young woman he meets at an immigration advocacy center.
Emotionally fragile, Alice is volunteering at the center after suffering a nervous breakdown at her high-powered job.
“Samba” premiered last year at the Toronto Film Festival and has met with mixed critical response.
Sy said that he and the two directors have a special connection. “We are touched by the same things,” he says. “They have faith in human beings. They give a lot of hope in their movies.”
And after the recordbreaking achievements of “The Intouchables,” the filmmakers “wanted to explore something else with Omar because the character in ‘The Intouchables’ of Driss is very much like Omar,” said Nakache by phone from New York. “We wanted him to stretch. Samba is very far from him. He’s not the catalyst for the comedy. The comedy comes from others.”
“After winning the César, I wanted to prove to myself that I am really an actor, that I can perform a character really far from me,” noted Sy. “I wanted him to be really different.”
Sy gained weight, changed his hairstyle, affected an African accent and learned how to make himself inconspicuous.
“I was born in France, raised in France, so walking on the streets is so natural for me,” said Sy, who is a lanky 6 foot 3.
“My height is an advantage. But when you are Samba, it’s different. It’s a disadvantage to have that height. When you work, you don’t want to be noticed. So you have to hide — the way you tilt your head, you speak less loud. Everything is changed.”
His parents are immigrants from West Africa who came to France 50 years ago.
“I am the son of immigrants. That is why I am connected to the subject, because of my own story,” he said. “In the 1960s in France, there was a lot of work. It was easy to be legal at this time because France needed people to work. It was easy to have papers and cross the border. Today it has changed completely. [My parents] learned that from the movie. They were so surprised because things changed since their time.”
Sy recalled going to see “Jurassic Park” as a teenager after school with his friends. So when he was cast in “Jurassic World,” he was “so proud and happy. Being on the set for this franchise and in a Hollywood movie is crazy.”
Sy recently completed the Bradley Cooper comedy “Adam Jones,” which is opening in October, and Ron Howard’s thriller “Inferno,” in which Tom Hanks returns as Robert Langdon and Sy plays a villain. And he’s about to return to his homeland to make a film about a father and his 11-year-old daughter.
But despite his sudden Hollywood fame, Sy made a promise to his longtime director friends in France.
“Each time they will need me, I’ll be there,” Sy noted with a warm smile. “Even if I am just a waiter or opening a door.”