Niels Schneider spent his first years on screen being looked at, in Xavier Dolan's early films, and has spent the years since choosing men who are harder to like. As Leclerc in De Gaulle: Liberté he is lean and quick.
Fi1m perspective
In De Gaulle: Liberté (2026), Niels Schneider's Général Leclerc does not stand still. He is lean and sunburnt and impatient, a man who would plainly rather be driving across the desert than sitting in a tent while the general is argued over, and Antonin Baudry's film is at its liveliest when it is out there with him and Noémie Schmidt's Susan Travers at the wheel. Then it cuts back to Paris and the question of who will lead France, and each time we lost him we found we wanted the desert back. That is the note Schneider hits well: a man with no time for the scene he is in.
He did not start like that. Born in France and raised in Montreal from the age of nine, he came up through voice work and theatre, and his first films were Xavier Dolan's first films: I Killed My Mother (2009), as Éric, and Heartbeats (2010), as Nicolas, the boy two friends fall for and the camera spends most of its time gazing at. It made him known and it typed him. For some years he was the beautiful one, the angelic one, the one being wanted rather than the one doing the wanting, and the career since has been an effort to get out of that.
Dark Inclusion (2016), in which he plays Pier Ulmann, a young man bent on revenge, is where the change is usually dated, and what critics have noticed in him since is what we noticed in the desert: he is good at men who are not telling you everything. He has made two films with Arthur Harari, worked with Emmanuel Mouret and Justine Triet, made a series for Xavier Giannoli in 2023 and appeared in Woody Allen's French-language Coup de chance (2023). The pattern in the choices is a taste for first-time directors and for small, intimate or genre pieces with something wrong at the centre.
What we can vouch for ourselves is narrower. Baudry asks him for a physical thing, a soldier's carriage and a soldier's temper, and he supplies it. He told franceinfo he had "presque tout appris du Général Leclerc", learned nearly everything from the man himself, and the homework shows in how he sits in a vehicle and how little he wastes on a line. What he is not given is a scene in which the impatience costs him anything. The part is one strand of a 159-minute film that is forever cutting to another strand, and Schneider is among the people it keeps leaving behind.
We would like to see him in a film that does not cut away. On the evidence of one role, and of a decade of parts chosen so as to be looked at less, the next thing worth seeing him in is probably small, French and directed by someone on their first or second film.
Biography
Niels Schneider is a French-Canadian actor. He was born on 18 June 1987 in France and moved to Montreal as a child. He began his career with voice work and made his screen debut in the late 2000s.
Schneider gained attention for his roles as Eric in I Killed My Mother (2009) and Nicolas in Heartbeats (2010), both directed by Xavier Dolan. He later appeared in Gemma Bovery (2014), Dalida (2017), Sibyl (2019), Coup de chance (2023) and other films. In 2011 he received the Trophée Chopard at Cannes and in 2017 won the César Award for Most Promising Actor for Dark Inclusion (2016). He was appointed a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters in 2019.
He plays Général Leclerc in the 2026 films De Gaulle: Résistance and De Gaulle: Liberté.
