Alain Chabat

Alain Chabat came up through Les Nuls, the comedy team that made its name on French television before turning itself loose on cinema. The film that resulted, catalogued here as Fear City: A Family-Style Comedy, he co-wrote and led, and French audiences have been quoting it back at him ever since. He was born in Oran in 1958.

His second act was as a director who casts himself, usually as the straight man being slowly worn down. Asterix & Obelix: Mission Cleopatra (2002) is the peak of it: he plays Julius Caesar with the weary precision of a middle manager, and directs the rest at a pitch that works for children and for people who catch every parody in it. Didier (1997), RRRrrrr!!! (2004) and HOUBA! On the Trail of the Marsupilami (2012) follow the same model with less success. He also created and hosted Burger Quiz, described in the source as the most watched entertainment show in the history of French television, which is a claim about reach rather than about jokes, though the show earned both.

The interesting part of the later career is who hires him. He turns up in small, precisely calibrated parts in surreal French comedies where his familiarity is itself the joke, and in English-language studio films such as Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian and Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, where he is essentially a walk-on with an accent. He holds a Cesar for a supporting performance. In 2025 he returned to Gaul once more, creating and voicing the animated series Asterix & Obelix: The Big Fight.