Agathe Rousselle

Three minutes into Titane (2021), before Agathe Rousselle has said anything, we know who Alexia is. Ruben Impens follows her in one long take through a car tuning show, past chrome and undercarriage lights and men filming on their phones, to a flame-painted car she climbs and grinds against while the light goes pink and gold. In three wordless minutes we know what kind of body this woman has and what she uses it for. It is the best sustained stretch of the film, and she carries it without a line.

She came to acting late and sideways. Rousselle worked as a journalist, an editor, a model and a photographer, co-founded a feminist magazine called Peach in 2016, took drama classes from fifteen to twenty-two, and appeared in short films from 2013, with a lead in 5 vagues de l'avenir (2015). There was no agent. "I didn't have an agent. A casting director found me on Instagram," she said in 2021, and Julia Ducournau put her at the centre of her second feature. It is a debut in the strictest sense, and it does not look like one.

What she does in Titane is act from the neck down and the eyes out. She works with her jaw and her shoulders and the flat way she looks at people who are about to be in trouble, and that look is what we remember. We found it colder than anything the film does with a car, because it is unhurried and does not care whether we understand it. The muscle training, dance and stunt work she did for the part shows on screen as stillness, not strain. Then the film hands her to Vincent Lindon, playing a fire captain who decides she is his son missing for ten years, and she has to hold that lie in his house for an hour with almost nothing to say. That we can still read what Alexia wants from a man she ought to be running from is the harder half of the performance, and the quieter one.

The film goes slack for half an hour in the middle, and that is Ducournau's grip loosening, not hers. Since then she has taken a supporting part in Gold Brick (2023), played Rita in How to Make Gravy (2024), appeared in A Second Life (2025) and moved into English-language television with the series 12 12 12 (2026). We have not reviewed them and will not pretend to a view.

So the caveat is the obvious one. We have seen her do one thing, and do it well, and it is a thing that needed almost no dialogue. Whether she can hold a scene with words rather than a stare is a question Titane was never built to answer. We would like, next, to hear her talk.