Salif Cissé is the one in the scene who is listening. In All Hands on Deck he turned the friend who came along for the ride into the person we watched, and the parts since have been a test of whether that stillness can carry a film.
Fi1m perspective
Halfway through Guillaume Brac's All Hands on Deck (2021) there is a campsite, a mother with a small child, and Chérif sitting near them saying not very much. Félix, the boy whose chase after a girl the film is supposedly about, is off somewhere talking. Cissé plays Chérif as a man who has noticed everyone else before they have noticed him, and he lets the noticing do the work. We liked him more the less he did, and by the tent scenes we were waiting for the film to return to him. The reason is simple: in a comedy about a boy performing for a girl, Cissé plays the one man who is not performing for anyone.
He came to the screen from the stage, trained at the Paris conservatoires, and has kept working in theatre while the film parts arrived. Brac's film was his first lead, one of three, and it set the pattern for what directors have asked of him since: supporting parts in films by Arnaud Desplechin and Valérie Donzelli, a recurring role in the television series Lupin (2023), and, for Desplechin again, the director's own alter ego at thirty in Spectateurs (2024). He wrote and directed a short, Alliés, in 2023. His first proper lead came with Fabienne Godet's comedy Le Répondeur (2025), opposite Denis Podalydès, with Météors (2025) alongside it and Paolo (2026) still in post-production. We have not reviewed these and will not judge them here.
What we can say from the one we have seen is what he is good at. He plays ordinary men from the suburbs without underlining that they are ordinary or that they are from the suburbs, which is rarer than it sounds. He is funny without reaching for it. He has the theatre actor's habit of holding a position and letting the other person move, and on screen that reads as ease.
The risk is the flip side of the same coin. Cissé has said his method is being willing to adapt to any situation he is in, and an actor who adapts to everything can vanish into whichever director he is working for. What we have not yet seen from him is a man who is wrong, or angry, or wanting something badly enough to be embarrassing about it. Brac found the watchfulness. Someone now needs to make him do something with it other than watch.
Biography
Salif Cissé is a French actor, screenwriter and director. He trained at the Conservatoire national supérieur d’art dramatique after discovering theatre at secondary school.
He made his feature-film debut as Chérif in Guillaume Brac’s All Hands on Deck! (2020), which premiered at the Berlinale. Subsequent screen credits include the Netflix series Lupin (2021 and 2023) as the younger Jean-Luc Keller, Just the Two of Us (2023), Brother and Sister (2022), This Is My Mother (2023), Juliette in Spring (2024) and Guess Who’s Calling! (2025). He is also attached to the series Paolo (2026).
Cissé wrote and directed the short film Alliés (2023) and the mini-series Couronnes (2020). He is due to represent France at the European Shooting Stars in 2026.
