With more than a 100 acting credits and six features as a director, including 2016’s Monsieur Chocolat starring Omar Sy, you would think Roschdy Zem might be a little jaded by now.
The Franco-Moroccan star, whose career began in 1987, has reached the pinnacle for many actors, sharing the Best Actor prize at Cannes in 2006 for Days of Glory, the story of four North African soldiers fighting for France in the Second World War. More recently, he won the French Cesar for Oh Mercy! (2019), a taut police procedural that confirmed his range beyond the stoic roles that made his name.
Yet when we meet, just weeks before his 60th birthday, Zem is as enthusiastic as an actor half his age.
“It feels like I’m beginning,” he tells The National. “I’m an eternal beginner as an actor. I feel like I’m searching for a new way to work too, you know? So I’m getting out of my comfort zone. That’s why I like to work in foreign countries, trying to speak in another language with other people. It’s interesting, getting out of my routine.”
Mostly, he has acted in English, Arabic and French, but sometimes he goes further afield.
“Sometimes I’m acting in a language that I don’t even understand,” he laughs. “I played in Hebrew [for 2005’s Live and Become], I played in Serbian [2006’s La Californie], and I don’t understand what I’m saying! It’s just phonetics.”
Does that change the way he acts? “I don’t know,” he shrugs. “I don’t want to analyse it. That’s how I feel. I don’t really know the reason, and I don’t really need to know the reason.”
Zem’s latest film Elisa, currently on the festival circuit after its premiere in Venice, offers another opportunity to break routine. Directed by Leonardo Di Costanzo, the drama casts Zem as Alaoui, a criminologist who meets Elisa (Barbara Ronchi), a woman imprisoned for a decade after killing her sister and burning the body.
Their sessions together – inspired by real-life research by Italian criminologists Adolfo Ceretti and Lorenzo Natali – probe the grey areas between morality and madness.
With dialogue in Italian and French, Zem’s performance is stripped of any cinematic glamour, far from Hollywood’s stylised depictions of criminal profilers. (Manhunter’s Will Graham, for example, feels worlds away.)
Di Costanzo cast Zem after seeing the “kind, human and empathetic” police commissioner he played in Oh Mercy! – qualities Zem again channels here. He met a real criminologist to prepare, though he laughs at how far the portrayal departs from psychological accuracy.
“He was more elegant than I am, more bright, but I wanted to lower the image of criminology,” he says. “We think criminologists are psychologists, but they’re not.
“Here, he’s trying to study why an ordinary woman commits a crime, and he doesn’t have the skills to analyse in a psychological way, so he says things that psychologists would never say. I showed the script to my ex-wife – she’s a psychologist – and she said: ‘Oh my God, he says terrible things! You couldn’t say that as a therapist!’”
The story draws from the real case of Stefania Albertani, an Italian woman convicted of killing her sister – but Zem insists Elisa avoids true-crime sensationalism.
“The difference between a woman like Elisa and us is very small,” he reflects. “You can cross the border to the other side depending on the situation – a very bad situation – and that’s why it’s so fascinating.”
That sense of ordinariness, he believes, is also key to his own appeal. Born in Gennevilliers, in the north-west suburbs of Paris, after his parents emigrated from Morocco, Zem grew up in a modest home.
His father was a construction worker, his mother a homemaker. At one point the family relied on Catholic Relief Services, and Zem spent several years living with a Belgian family before returning home at the age of six. Later, he helped his parents sell jeans at a flea market in Clignancourt – a long way from the red carpets of Cannes and Venice.
His route into acting was via an amateur theatre course, and for years he was cast as the archetypal “tough guy” – the silent, muscular presence. That image began to shift with Savages (2019), in which he played a politician of Algerian descent on the verge of becoming France’s first Maghrebi president. A Muslim president? Sacre bleu!
Followed by Oh Mercy! and now Elisa, his recent work charts a new path for North African representation in French cinema – intelligent, sensitive, empathetic men whose strength lies in thought, not aggression.
“I never saw myself like that,” he admits. “And now? I’ve got no choice.”
