Grégory Montel

Watch Grégory Montel when someone else is talking. In Call My Agent (2015) his Gabriel Sarda spends much of his time listening to a client, a colleague or a rival, and the face does the work before the mouth catches up: a wince, a swallow, the look of a man who has just worked out how this is going to go. We called it soft panic in our review, and it is the thing he does that nobody else in that ensemble does. Camille Cottin is the reason to start the series. Montel is one of the reasons to stay.

Gabriel is a good man in the wrong profession, and the show gets much of its warmth from the gap between the two. Montel has said of the part: "Donner ce rôle de dépressif, timide et mal dégrossi à quelqu'un qui a une forte chaleur naturelle, ça a créé une vraie rencontre entre un personnage et un comédien." Give a depressive, shy, rough-edged character to someone with natural warmth and the two meet halfway. He does not play Gabriel as a loser. He plays him as a man who likes people too much to sell them well. A few episodes in we found we were watching him at the edge of other people's scenes, waiting for the moment his conscience caught up with his job, and it always did.

The career before that was slow. He came to acting from law, trained at Cours Florent in Paris, and was on stage from 2003 and on screen from 2007. His first lead was Michel in L'Air de rien (2012). Since then he has kept a small company around him: three films with the director Grégory Magne, three with Laure Calamy, who plays Noémie alongside him at the agency, two with Thibault de Montalembert. Les Parfums (2019), in which he plays Guillaume Favre, is the supporting turn from this stretch most worth seeking out, though we have not reviewed it.

He has kept something else as well. At Cours Florent he was told he played too provincial and tried to sand down the Provençal accent; he has since stopped trying, and it is now part of what he brings. It suits him. The men he plays are rarely the smoothest people at the table, and a voice that gives away where it comes from does half the job for him.

Since the series ended in 2020 he has gone abroad: Philippe Frot in Transatlantic (2023), a series about the Resistance and the rescue of refugees; Gerard Abel in Upgraded (2024), an English-language romantic comedy; a part in The Killer (2024). We have not seen enough of these to judge them. The question they raise is simple. English-language productions tend to want their French actors to be either the charmer or the villain, and Montel is neither; he is the man who fumbles the pitch and means well. If they let him be that, he will be fine. If they want the charmer, they have hired the wrong Frenchman.