“Normal would have been a life of boredom”, notes Karim Leklou soberly. At 39, the actor who was a doctor without a diploma in the series Hippocratescop in North ferry, soldier of the Sentinel patrol for The Third Warby Giovanni Aloi, kid from the housing estates setting up a somewhat absurd affair in The world is yoursby Romain Gavras, explodes on the screens… “ I’m lucky…I’ve been lucky…I’m lucky…”, he keeps repeating, looking like a greedy kid with his hand in the jam jar. We find it, magnificent, in full maturity, occupying all the space, in Drop of goldby Clément Cogitore, presented in a special screening at Critics’ Week.
“I am not into self-analysis. I’m just accepting my carcass and what’s inside a little bit more.”
Karim Leklou grew up in the Yvelines, in Saint-Cyr-l’Ecole, a suburb of Versailles. HLM. Breton mother, receptionist; father from Algeria, storekeeper for a machine tool manufacturer. He was 7 years old when the parents separated. Only son, he remains to live with his father. There is no other family, Karim hardly knew his grandparents.
In the evening, when the father comes home from work, they take communion in front of the television. Generation VHS and Panini vignettes, which allow you to collect portraits of footballers. “ We talk badly about football, even though it’s one of the few things that brings people out into the streets and makes adults fall back into childhoodhe said. I played with my left foot, and football made me travel and opened me up to geopolitics. Euro 92 put Albania on my world map, Socrates introduced me to the Brazilian dictatorship…” And then, therefore, there is the cinema. “ We watched everything. Westerns, comedies, action films… My father believed in culture, as an inestimable good. »
“Objects of Desire”
A sales force BTS in his pocket, Karim Leklou discovers the wonderful world of telemarketing, navigating from one temporary assignment to another. In return, the kid who dreamed of winning the World Cup is looking for something that could brighten up his life, concluding, in the end, that cinema is one of the few things that does him good. So he enrolled in evening classes at Cours Florent (“ Because I knew nothing about it”), takes a liking to it (“ It made me happy, alive “) and begins to pass castings.
A prophet, by Jacques Audiard. He is 26 years old. He prepares for the audition in a McDonald’s on the avenue de Flandre, in Paris, with his friend Taha Lemaizi, whom he met during the Florent course, obtains a very small role, but that is enough to make him fall on this planet that he will never leave. more. “My father, he was worried about my future. » Died ten years ago, this one will not see the rise of his son; he only knew the worries of economic fragility. “ Whereas today I have the impression of accessing the objects of desire from my childhood”testifies the actor.
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