For Théodore Pellerin, vulnerability is not a weakness to be masked but a professional asset to be mined – and it is this very quality that has propelled the French‑Canadian actor into a fast‑rising career. With a gangly frame and eyes that hold the camera, he has made a signature of the kind of raw, unguarded presence that directors now prize.
His latest role, in the French character study Nino, is a case in point. Pellerin plays a young Parisian who, after being diagnosed with HPV‑related throat cancer, is locked out of his apartment for a weekend and must navigate the city to freeze his sperm before treatment leaves him infertile. The film, directed by former journalist Pauline Loquès, draws on her personal outrage following the death of a family member from cancer at the age of 37. Yet Pellerin imbues the story with a cellular understanding: the cancer, he explains, “isn’t insignificant”, because it attacks the part of the body that links the head to the torso, creating a dissociation from the emotions. “Because it comes from a sexually transmitted disease, his sexuality – a strong life force – is stunted too. So his mission is to speak and to ejaculate.” His urgent search for a private place becomes a Gen‑Z answer to Agnès Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7, albeit one centred on the improbably difficult task of finding somewhere to masturbate.
Loquès recognised in Pellerin a singular gift for making silence speak. “Théodore had this ability to give life to silences,” she says. “They became charged with other dimensions – poetic, mysterious or psychological.” She notes that he understood the film’s underlying theme of parenthood better than she did, a revelation that surprised her given how deeply the project was rooted in her own experience. The film is rich with parental and quasi‑parental encounters – including a cameo from Mathieu Amalric offering aftershave – and Pellerin’s interpretation gave it a layer of meaning the director had not consciously intended.
Pellerin’s rising trajectory owes as much to his role in last year’s caustic psychological thriller Lurker, where he played a parasocial LA hipster whose vulnerability curdles into dangerous neediness, as to earlier work such as the Québécois crime film Family First (in which he was a loose‑cannon apprentice hoodlum) and the television series On Becoming a God in Central Florida (where he tutored Kirsten Dunst in pyramid‑scheme proselytising). Even his most strident characters retain a disarming innocence, and his ability to convey complex emotions through subtle performance – the flicker of a hesitation, the weight of a silence – has become his centre of gravity.
That subtlety is not accidental. Pellerin describes himself as a methodical performer who spends considerable time researching a script before trying to forget everything on set. Loquès quotes him saying, “I’m not a great actor but I know how to read a script really well.” This upstream research, she explains, is where he expands; then he lets it go. His approach has allowed him to navigate the pivotal masturbation scene in Nino with a lightness that risks neither comedy nor exploitation. Loquès was initially uncomfortable directing the moment, anxious not to sexualise what is meant to be a moment of liberation, but Pellerin took it in his stride – he had already performed a similar scene as Karl Lagerfeld’s boyfriend Jacques de Bascher in a television series. “Nino wasn’t really a big deal,” he says.
Born to a choreographer mother and a painter father, Pellerin grew up in theatre dressing rooms and made his television debut at sixteen in the popular Québécois school drama 30 Vies. He quickly racked up French‑language credits – playing a younger version of Vincent Cassel’s character in Xavier Dolan’s It’s Only the End of the World and a possibly mentally ill street tough in Family First – before deliberately learning English to expand his range. He now moves between the two languages with ease, but describes English as requiring a more conscious intellectual effort: “Phrases are constructed in such a way that, for them to have the right sense, you have to hit the right accents. In French, you don’t have to worry about the rhythm. In English, it’s more pap‑a‑pap‑a‑pap‑pap‑pap.” His flawless LA drawl in Lurker and the RP he had to master for his role as a castrato music professor in Tom Ford’s upcoming period drama Cry to Heaven attest to his linguistic dexterity.
The emotional toll of his roles can be lasting. After Family First he feared remaining permanently in a sadistic frame of mind; Lurker left him steeped in cynicism and rejection. Nino, by contrast, was a character he did not want to release. “It was more of a return to my life, to frivolity,” he says. “I found it hard: it was like a loss of poetry in my life.”
Interviewed via Zoom from his home in Montreal, Pellerin presents a brisk, business‑student demeanour – plaid shirt, cropped hair, oval glasses – that belies the vulnerability he channels on screen. But when the hour struck noon, he ended the conversation abruptly. “I’ve got my therapy session on Zoom now,” he said with a wry smile. “So that’s what I’ll be doing with my psychologist.” For an actor who treats vulnerability as a full‑time job, the work is never quite done.
