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Déborah Lukumuena: ‘To be on screen with the body and skin I have is already very political’

Déborah Lukumuena trained for months at a wrestling club in Paris in order to play a wrestler and bodyguard for her latest hit film, Robust. She noticed that in a match there would often be one minute of combat that “was very intense, very physical” and outside that, “you have to find a way to use your breath to keep calm”. Her performance as Aïssa, the personal protection officer for an erratic, ageing film star, has been lauded by French critics for its mesmerising serenity and imposing physical presence. “Sometimes the greatest outer shell can hide the greatest inner softness,” she says.

Lukumuena, 27, is considered one of the best French actors of her generation. Aged 22, she became the first black woman, and the youngest ever actor, to win a best supporting role César – France’s equivalent to the Oscar – for the suburban Paris high-rise thriller Divines. Since then, she has carefully chosen her roles – from a troubled theatre actor in Anaïs Volpé’s The Braves to a burger-bar worker who reacts to a customer hitting his partner in the short-film series H24. She is now breaking into English, starring in Girl, the first feature from acclaimed Glasgow-based writer and director Adura Onashile; she plays a mother who creates an isolated world with her 11-year-old daughter.

The actor says she chooses roles “with my heart”; characters she would want to watch on screen. She believes young French people want to see more of their real lives reflected in cinema. This means more representation for minorities, and different body shapes. “To be on screen with the body I have, and the skin I have, is already very political,” she says. “It raises the question: why don’t we see more people like that?”

Lukumuena was raised by her mother, a school dinner-lady, on a social housing estate near Paris, in a small town she describes as part woodland, part tower blocks. Her parents, who arrived in France from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (then called Zaire) at the end of the 1980s, separated when she was six. Her mother was focused on her children’s wellbeing, she says. But money was tight and the children had to grow up fast. The fourth of five children, Lukumuena spent afternoons and weekends in the fiction section of the local library, “escaping into the imaginary”.

Watching the series The Tudors inspired her to start acting. It was the fact that Jonathan Rhys Meyers, small and athletic, was playing the much bigger-bodied Henry VIII, yet had a believable “magnetism”, she says. She was studying literature at the Sorbonne, but started looking for adverts for film extras. “I thought I’d start small, because I didn’t see women that looked like me in French cinema, so I didn’t think I’d be able to do this fast,” she says.

She replied to an advert for the film Divines, not expecting a reply. But at 19 and with no formal acting training, she was cast in the role of the devoted best friend, Maimouna, which earned her several awards, including the César, and sudden fame. Then she did something unheard-of for an award-winning young screen star: she paused and went to Paris’s elite ultra-competitive acting school for three years of intense classical training. She loved playing Chekhov on stage, but hints that fitting in, having won an award, wasn’t easy.

In Lukumuena’s latest film, Robust, the director Constance Meyer wrote the role for her: a young bodyguard from the Paris banlieue (suburbs) who arrives to protect a huge but fragile cinema star, Georges, who initially assumes she is a man. Georges is played by the French actor Gérard Depardieu, 73, in a riff on his own stardom.

She says: “What is good is that while appearances might make you think Georges will teach Aïssa everything, or you might fear a colonial backwardness where the bourgeois white man teaches the young black woman from the banlieue how to live, everything that happens is actually the exact opposite of that.”

Lukumuena describes Robust as “a very feminist film” about a woman who saves a man. “Constance told me that when she was writing it, she had in mind a kind of painting – whether it exists or not – of a man who had fainted in the arms of a woman.” Aïssa literally and metaphorically “teaches him to breathe again”, she says.

The film shot in the winter of 2020, before it was revealed in February 2021 that Dépardieu had been charged with the rape and sexual assault of an actor in her 20s, Charlotte Arnould, at his Paris home in 2018. He denies the allegations and tried to get charges dropped, but this year the Paris chief prosecutor said there was “serious and confirmed evidence” that justified maintaining the charges. The investigation by a prosecuting magistrate is continuing.

Lukumuena did not know about the rape investigation at the time the film was made. She says: “There is an investigation under way, a woman has made allegations, she must be listened to, both must be listened to, and I hope justice will be done.”

She is now in edits for her own first short film as a writer and a director, Championne, about a young woman working at a fast-food restaurant befriending a delivery driver for Uber Eats, who reveals she works at night as a dominatrix. Lukumuena plays the fast-food worker, describing the character as “a young, fat black woman who is not represented” in dominant cultural norms, and who “finally finds herself, her body and her sexuality”.

For her, the body is a tool of cinema narration, but always rooted in good writing. As a teenager she was blown away by Rabelais’s 16th-century comic masterpiece, Gargantua. “This insolent giant who takes up space, who doesn’t fit norms and who scrutinises and criticises everyone – at high school I think I identified a lot with that!”

She has mostly worked with female directors – not as a fixed rule, but perhaps because they are writing the most engaging characters, she suggests – and she often chooses first feature films. “It’s exciting to be there for the first frisson of a director on a first feature – something new that will never happen again, there’s a tension and a special energy to it,” she says.

She found shooting with Onashile in central Glasgow in between the pandemic lockdowns “a doubly symbolic” experience. “She was the first black woman director I’ve worked with, which is symbolic because in France there are very few. I always need to see to what point the person behind the camera resembles me, and I’ve found lots in common with all the directors I’ve worked with. But this was the first time I had someone who massively resembled me – the same daily life, the same fears, the same revolt. I would find it very interesting in the near future to work with someone who’s not like me at all to see what the connection would be. But in Glasgow, at last I’d found someone who looked at me the same way I could look at her, because we looked like each other.”

For Lukumuena, seeking out good writing, or writing films herself, means questioning cinema’s norms and rules of beauty, questioning the conventional focus on thin bodies. She describes a last-minute decision to head out to the cinema alone at 10pm the previous night to watch the French director François Ozon’s Fassbinder-inspired Peter von Kant. She was gripped by the performance of Denis Ménochet, who has a bigger body.

“Even if he’s a white man, the fact of seeing a physique that’s approaching mine, a physique that doesn’t respect the norms but excels and is beautiful, I take that as representation and it does me so much good. It comforts me in the idea that these norms must fall away. It’s cinema’s vocation to narrate different stories through different vectors. It’s all about the writing, and I always say people write what they fantasise about. There are still very few people who fantasise outside the established codes.”