Laurent Lafitte

Laurent Lafitte won the Cesar Award for Best Actor for The Richest Woman in the World in 2025, which was the culmination of a long and slightly unusual approach. He had already been nominated three times in the supporting category, for Elle in 2016, See You Up There in 2017 and The Count of Monte Cristo in 2024, and all three are performances built on making an audience uncomfortable.

That is the trick of his career. He arrived through comedy, appearing as himself on television panel shows including Burger Quiz and The Apartment, with small film parts in Belle Maman, Narco and The Crimson Rivers along the way. Comic actors who cross into drama usually bring warmth with them. He brought precision instead, and French directors worked out that a man with immaculate comic timing makes an excellent bully: the pauses land the same way, but the effect is menace.

Hence Patrick in Elle, Henri Pradelle in See You Up There, Gerard de Villefort in the 2024 Count of Monte Cristo, and Louis XVI in One Nation, One King. In 2023 he played the businessman and politician Bernard Tapie in the Netflix mini-series Class Act, which is not among the credits listed here, and drew an International Emmy nomination for it.

The lighter work has not gone away. He is Antoine across both Little White Lies films, half of a double act as Francois Monge in On the Other Side of the Tracks and The Takedown, and a regular in the Asterix animations, where he voices Caesar.