Biography
Antonythasan Jesuthasan, also known by the pseudonym Shobasakthi, is a Sri Lankan Tamil author and actor. He was born in 1967 in Allaipiddy on the island of Velanaitivu in northern Sri Lanka.
As a teenager he joined the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam during the Sri Lankan civil war. He left the organisation, was imprisoned, and reached France as a refugee in 1993, where he worked in various low-paid jobs. He began writing under the name Shobasakthi in the late 1990s. His acting career began in 2011 when he wrote and starred in the Tamil film Sengadal. He played the title role in Jacques Audiard’s Dheepan (2015), which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes; he received a César nomination for best actor for the performance. He has since appeared in films including A Private War (2018), Paris Pigalle (2018), Casanova, Last Love (2019), The Coyotes (2021), The Stronghold (2021) and Notre-Dame on Fire (2022).
