Gilles Cohen

Gilles Cohen is one of those French actors whose face you know from thirty films and whose name you would have to look up, which describes a good career rather than a failed one. Born in Paris in 1963, he has accumulated more than sixty film credits across drama, thriller, comedy and television, and has been working steadily since a small part as a rogue in Three Men and a Cradle in 1985.

What he gets cast as, over and over, is an institution. He is the police commissioner in How I Became a Superhero, a capitaine in the series The Traveller, a pastor in Mea Culpa, a barrister in La Syndicaliste where the part is the real defence lawyer Herve Temime, and the politician Georges Mandel in De Gaulle. He gives those roles weight with no visible effort, which is exactly the skill involved: an audience has to believe the institution exists before a hero can push against it.

The two credits that matter most are for Jacques Audiard. He is Sami in The Beat That My Heart Skipped and Prof in A Prophet, two films about men learning a trade under bad conditions, and in both he functions as part of the pressure rather than as relief from it. He works the comedies too, Serial (Bad) Weddings 2, It Boy, OSS 117: From Africa with Love, The New Toy, where the job is to play everything straight while the rest of the cast clowns. Television gave him The Bureau, which is the other role people tend to cite.