Zinédine Zidane
Everything on this page is downstream of a football career. Zinedine Zidane, known everywhere as Zizou, played as an attacking midfielder and is routinely listed among the best to have played the game: FIFA World Player of the Year in 1998, 2000 and 2003, and the Ballon d'Or in 1998. He was a playmaker whose reputation rests on control and vision rather than volume. He later managed Real Madrid across two spells between 2016 and 2021, winning repeatedly at both domestic and international level.
The screen credits are incidental and, to his credit, mostly honest about that. He appears as himself in Goal! and again in Goal II: Living the Dream, football fictions that borrowed real players for credibility. He turns up in The Class of ‘92, about the Manchester United generation he spent a decade playing against, and in Kroos, a portrait of a midfielder he would later manage. Evening Urgant is a Russian talk show appearance.
The single real acting job is Asterix at the Olympic Games, where he is cast as Numerodis in a French comic book adaptation stuffed with sporting cameos. It plays roughly as well as a footballer in comedy costume usually does, which is to say the film is not asking much and neither is he.
Movies (5)
TV (1)
Where to start with Zinédine Zidane
If you want Zidane the subject rather than Zidane the cameo, The Class of ‘92 is the pick. It is a serious documentary about a specific generation of players, and his contributions carry the weight of a rival who watched the whole thing happen from the other side of the pitch.
Kroos is the better film about the modern game, following a midfielder Zidane managed, and it gives him room to talk about the position he actually played. Goal! and Goal II: Living the Dream are for football fans only, fiction propped up by real faces.
Asterix at the Olympic Games is the curiosity and the one to save for a very specific mood. He is not an actor, the film knows it, and there is a certain charm in watching one of the great players of his era stand in a costume and read a line.