Jean Reno
Jean Reno is an actor, born 1948.
Reno's career is largely the story of one collaboration. Born Juan Moreno y Herrera-Jimenez in Casablanca to Spanish parents, he built it in French cinema, where Luc Besson cast him in Subway in 1985, then The Big Blue, then Nikita, then Leon, each part stripping away a little more dialogue.
Victor the Cleaner in Nikita runs about five minutes and is the reason for everything that followed: a fixer who arrives, explains a filthy job in a bored voice, and leaves. Leon extends that into a lead, and it works because Reno plays the character's professional competence and his childishness with exactly the same face, never signalling which one is the act. Three Cesar nominations came out of this stretch, for The Big Blue, The Visitors and Leon.
Hollywood then hired him for precisely one thing: the European professional. Mission: Impossible, Godzilla, Ronin, The Da Vinci Code, The Pink Panther. The films range from very good, in the case of Ronin, where he is the only character granted any interior life, to entirely indifferent, and none of it damaged him because he kept going home between jobs.
In France he remained a genuine star, in the Visitors comedies, the Crimson Rivers thrillers and Wasabi, and he has kept working into his seventies, including Da 5 Bloods and a steady stream of animation voices.
Movies (65)
- Zootopia 2 (2025)
- Tuner (2026)
- Léon: The Professional (1994)
- Mission: Impossible (1996)
- Flushed Away (2006)
- Lift (2024)
- The Da Vinci Code (2006)
- Marsupilami (2026)
- Godzilla (1998)
- The Big Blue (1988)
- The Pink Panther (2006)
- Ronin (1998)
- Hotel Rwanda (2004)
- 22 Bullets (2010)
- Ruby & Quentin (2003)
- The Visitors (1993)
- Couples Retreat (2009)
- Nikita (1990)
- My Summer in Provence (2014)
- Wasabi (2001)
- Die Hart (2023)
- The Round Up (2010)
- The Pink Panther 2 (2009)
- Crimson Rivers II: Angels of the Apocalypse (2004)
- French Kiss (1995)
- Armored (2009)
- Alex Cross (2012)
- Cold Blood (2019)
- Just Visiting (2001)
- Margaret (2011)
TV (5)
Where to start with Jean Reno
Start with Léon: The Professional, not because it is the best film here but because it holds the whole actor: enormous physical control, very little dialogue, and a child performance he has to support from underneath. Then go back to Nikita for the five minutes that made him, where he plays a fixer describing a horrible job in the voice of a man reading a parts list.
Subway and The Big Blue are the earlier Besson films and show him before the persona hardened. Ronin is the best film on the list and the one that grants him an inner life. For the French popular work that English-speaking audiences usually skip, The Visitors is broad medieval farce and was a phenomenon at home, The Crimson Rivers is a grim and effective thriller, and Wasabi is nonsense with charm.
The Besson years
Five films with Luc Besson built the career, and Leon is the one everybody knows. The Big Blue made him a star in France, Subway is where the collaboration starts, and Godzilla was the Hollywood crossover it led to.
The French comedies
Almost invisible outside France and enormous inside it. Les Visiteurs was one of the biggest French box office hits ever made, and he plays a medieval knight loose in the present with total commitment across three films.
The international work
The English-language career, which is mostly hired-gun work and occasionally much better than that. Ronin is the best of it, The Crimson Rivers is the French thriller that travelled furthest, and Da 5 Bloods is the recent Spike Lee.