Matthias Schoenaerts

Matthias Schoenaerts made his first film at fourteen, in the Belgian drama Daens, itself an Academy Award nominee for best foreign language film, and then worked for years in Flemish and Dutch cinema with little international attention. Loft, in 2008, is the film he became known for at home. Bullhead in 2011 was the one that travelled, an Oscar nominee that put him in front of a great many people who had never heard of him.

Rust and Bone in 2012 is the film to understand him by, and it won him the Cesar for most promising actor. Schoenaerts is a very large man and almost every director shoots him as a physical fact first, but the interesting thing is how gently he plays. Heavy body, careful hands, long silences. He is at his best as men who have more feeling than vocabulary, which is why Gabriel Oak in Far from the Madding Crowd fits him so exactly, and why The Mustang, in which a prisoner is handed a wild horse to train, works at all.

The English language career has been uneven in the way that tends to happen to European actors imported for their presence. The Drop and A Bigger Splash use him properly. The Danish Girl, Suite Francaise and Red Sparrow mostly use him as furniture with a good face, though Booker in The Old Guard is a rare franchise part with some grief in it. He also has the odd distinction of appearing in both the Flemish Loft and its American remake.