Thibault de Montalembert

Watch Thibault de Montalembert cross the office in Dix pour cent (2015), the series Britain knows as Call My Agent. Mathias Barneville does not hurry, does not raise his voice, and does not look round at Noémie, the assistant for whom devotion to him is a full-time job, because he has never had to. When we reviewed the series we said he gives Mathias the ease of a man who has never had to explain himself and is about to, and the performance lives in that gap. He treats trouble as administration. We kept finding ourselves on his side, more often than Fanny Herrero's writing seems to intend, and it is the delivery that does it: a low, unbothered voice saying the indefensible in the tone most people use to confirm a lunch.

He had been doing something like it, more quietly, for nearly thirty years. He trained at Cours Florent and then at the École des Amandiers under Patrice Chéreau and Pierre Romans, and his early screen work came through that door: Hôtel de France (1987), then La Sentinelle (1992), the first of three films with Arnaud Desplechin. There were two years as a pensionnaire at the Comédie-Française in the mid-1990s, and nine films alongside Bruno Todeschini. From the late 1990s he was also the French voice of Hugh Grant, so the voice was familiar at home long before the face. Critics called the work solid, which is what they call an actor they have not been made to look at.

Then Mathias, for five years, and the shape of the career changed. He has said as much himself: "J'ai un ego de comédien, je manquais de la reconnaissance du public. Je l'obtiens avec Mathias." He had an actor's ego and had gone without the public's recognition; Mathias got it for him. Look at what came just before, though. Olivier Pujol in The Tunnel (2013) is the same bearing put to graver use, a reminder that the authority came first and the comedy was found inside it. Since the series he has been cast where that bearing is wanted, most visibly as General Foch in All Quiet on the Western Front (2022), a part measured in minutes.

What works is the softness under the authority. Mathias is never a villain because de Montalembert will not play him as one; he plays a man who assumes whoever he is talking to agrees with him, and lets us watch the assumption fail. He is generous inside the ensemble, too: Camille Cottin drives the series and he gives her something solid to push against. What we have not seen at length is him in a hurry, or out of his depth, or unsure what to do with his hands. He says he has always looked for eclecticism, and the stage years and the Desplechin films suggest it is there. The danger for an actor who arrives late is that he is offered the arriving part again and again. Someone should give him a man who has to explain himself and cannot.