Olivier Rabourdin is the man at the table whose mind is not yet made up, and he lets you watch it not being made up. Mostly a supporting actor, he is why a scene of men deciding something can feel undecided.
Fi1m perspective
Around the chapter table in Of Gods and Men (2010), Xavier Beauvois's Trappist monks decide whether to stay in Algeria as the killing comes closer, and the camera goes round one face at a time. Paul wants to go. Célestin is frightened. Amédée, the oldest, sees no reason to change anything. Christophe, the youngest, played by Olivier Rabourdin, does not know. We believed him, and we do not often believe an actor asked to play indecision, because it usually looks like waiting for the next line. Here it looked like a man who might say either thing, and that is a large part of why the decision felt open.
He came to that table late. Rabourdin trained at Nanterre-Amandiers under Patrice Chéreau in the late 1970s and began with small parts from 1985, among them The Satin Slipper. Then the 1990s happened to him, and he spent much of the decade in odd jobs rather than in films. The way back ran through Arnaud Desplechin and Kings and Queen (2004), and then a run of supporting roles between 2008 and 2010, in Taken, Welcome and Of Gods and Men, after which the work did not stop. He has made more than seventy films since, and has said that because success came late, "I completely appreciate what I’m living now."
What he gets cast as is the middle-aged man with a position: the official, the authority figure, the ordinary man with more going on than he shows. He plays them without display, so that whatever changes in a scene changes somewhere behind the face, and he is at his best in confined rooms with other people. Beauvois has used him three times and Desplechin twice, which tells you which directors have noticed. He has also gone where the money is, as Jean-Claude Pitrel in the Taken films and as Gauguin in Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris (2011), and into the convent of Benedetta (2021). His one substantial lead, Daniel in Robin Campillo's Eastern Boys (2013), we have not reviewed; it is the film that people who admire him tend to name first.
The reservation is the obvious one, and it is barely a reservation: he is a supporting actor, and the record holds few complaints beyond that. Films need a middle, and men like this are what it is built from. If you know him only from Taken, sit through the chapter scene in Of Gods and Men and watch the youngest monk fail to make up his mind.
Biography
Olivier Rabourdin is a French actor. He was born on 3 March 1959 in Nanterre, France, and has appeared in films since 1985.
He played Christophe in Of Gods and Men (2010), for which he received a nomination for the César Award for Best Supporting Actor. Other film roles include Jean-Claude Pitrel in Taken (2008) and Taken 2 (2012), Paul Gauguin in Midnight in Paris (2011), Richemont in The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (1999), and Alfonso Cecchi in Benedetta (2021).
