Sami Outalbali
Sami Outalbali is an actor, born 1999.
A Disney advertisement at the age of three is where the record starts, which makes Sami Outalbali one of those actors who has technically been working since before he could read. Born in Poissy in 1999, of Moroccan and Guadeloupean descent, he first appeared properly on screen in a France 3 television film in 2006, and had a minor role in the comedy The Tuche Family in 2011.
The part that made him was Ilyes in the OCS teen drama Grown Ups, which ran from 2016 to 2019 and asked him to play a high school student working out that he is gay. A role like that can tip into either martyrdom or comedy, and he kept it at neither, which is the skill worth naming here: he plays teenagers as people who are already tired of being looked at.
International recognition arrived with Sex Education, where he joined as Rahim for the 2020 and 2021 runs. Rahim is written as the impossibly composed French exchange student, a walking joke about how the English imagine the French, and Outalbali underplayed him hard enough that the joke landed without the character becoming one.
Since then the work has been mostly French: the supernatural series Mortel, A Tale of Love and Desire in 2021, November in 2022, The Brigade the year after, with the series Cash Queens listed here for 2026.
Movies (3)
TV (3)
Where to start with Sami Outalbali
Sex Education is the obvious entry and the right one, but skip ahead. He arrives after the first run, and the episodes where Rahim actually features are where you can see what he does with a part designed to be a punchline.
For the actor rather than the phenomenon, A Tale of Love and Desire is the better sit. It is a quiet French drama about desire and restraint, and it hands him a young man who cannot say what he wants, which is far harder to play than the confident boy.
The rest fills in the shape of a French career. November puts him in a large ensemble thriller, The Brigade and the much earlier comedy The Tuche Family show the range of what French film and television ask of him, and Cash Queens is the next one due.