The Canadian actor Théodore Pellerin, star of Nino, straddles the European and North American movie worlds. With his looks, talent and nose for a good role, he should go farTheodore Pellerin at Paris Fashion Week. Photograph: Laurent Hou/Hans Lucas/ AFP via Getty Fri Jun 19 2026 - 05:16 • 5 MIN READThéodore Pellerin, a young actor whose name you need to know, is currently at home in the great city of Montreal. This is worth noting, as, always crossing oceans, he is the exemplar of an international actor. He has been in American films such as Boy Erased and Beau Is Afraid. He has worked at home in projects such as Sophie Dupuis’s Solo and Xavier Dolan’s It’s Only the End of the World. He is in French films such as Continental Drift and the excellent, imminent Nino.Now 29, he must occasionally wonder where is best to lay his head.“Wherever you live, you’re always shooting elsewhere,” he says. “It doesn’t matter where you live. People live in LA, but no one shoots in LA. People live in Paris, but no one really shoots in Paris. So it doesn’t really matter. And Montreal is kind of between the States and France in a way. And it’s home. It’s where my parents are.”Sleek of aspect, Pellerin has, over the past decade, proved a versatile performer. This month we see him in Pauline Loquès’s Nino as a young Frenchman reeling from a recent diagnosis of throat cancer. It is a serious film but not a depressing one. The titular character, bumping about Paris in the days before his chemotherapy begins, seems impressively calm on the outside.“I don’t think he’s calm,” Pellerin says, disagreeing. “I think he’s already falling apart. I think it’s subtle. People can have very different interpretations and feelings watching the film. And that’s great. But to me it’s someone who’s already thinking a lot about his own death.”Nino premiered to great acclaim in the Critics’ Week strand of Cannes last year. Pellerin won the Louis Roederer Foundation rising-star award in that section, and the film went on to secure four nominations at the 51st César Awards (the “French Oscars”), taking best first feature and, for Pellerin, “best male revelation”.“The whole Nino journey was such a happy one,” he says. “It was such a beautiful one. All the steps were beautiful from the first time I read the script. From the audition to the meeting with Pauline, and then waiting some months and years for the film to happen.”Talk to me as if I am an idiot about the challenges, as someone from a Québécois background, of playing roles in French films. Was he welcomed into the French industry?“I was so welcomed,” he says. “I think it’s because I have the nose of a Frenchman. Ha ha! So they’re, like, ‘Oh, he’s one of us.’ I mean … literally!”Théodore Pellerin in Nino He agrees that Critics’ Week, centred a few hundred metres down the Croisette from the Palais des Festivals, is the perfect place to premiere such an intimate film. He enjoyed the experience sufficiently to serve on the Critics’ Week jury at this year’s event. He would have seen Alexander Murphy’s Tin Castle, the moving Irish documentary about an Irish Traveller family, among the selection.“A beautiful film,” he says. “I thought it was great. I wasn’t really aware of the Travellers. So they were new characters for me – and a new reality.”Let us spool back to the start of his career. Pellerin was born in 1997, the son of Denis Pellerin, a painter, and Marie Chouinard, a distinguished dancer and choreographer. One assumes such artistically inclined parents were content with their son drifting into the world of acting.“I don’t think they were that worried,” he says. “We were in Quebec. It’s not a very toxic industry, and also my parents are not in the TV or film industry at all. I have a friend who’s a casting director whose kid would like to become an actress, and she’s, like, ‘Oh no, how terrible! It’s so hard.’ My parents never had that perspective on things.”Would it be mad to suggest that it was an advantage to be raised in Quebec? That opened up an array of markets to the young actor.“Yeah, it feels like a privilege,” he says. “I wanted to be able to work around and not feel like I was belonging to a place and an industry. Because that’s where it becomes a bit annoying. I want to be outside all that and just focus on individual projects.”He genuinely seems to have satisfied that ambition over the past few years. He had a lead role opposite Kirsten Dunst in the TV series On Becoming a God in Central Florida. Alex Russell’s Lurker, in which he stars as a charismatic stalker, was a smash at Sundance in 2025 and ultimately scored Pellerin a best-actor nomination at the Independent Spirit Awards. In short, few actors of his age are so perfectly poised for a significant breakthrough. He is good looking. He has the acting chops. On Becoming a God in Central Florida: Théodore Pellerin and Kirsten Dunst. Photograph: Showtime Next up he joins the ensemble cast of Tom Ford’s take on Anne Rice’s 1982 novel Cry to Heaven. Focusing on the lives of castrati in 18th-century Italy, the film has been much pencilled in for a possible premiere at Venice International Film Festival in September.“I don’t know anything,” he says diplomatically. “It might take a while for the movie to be ready.”What a cast: Nicholas Hoult, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ciarán Hinds, Colin Firth, Owen Cooper, Hunter Schafer, Adele. Tom Ford, fashion designer, is back behind the camera for the first time in a decade. It sounds like a lavish experience.“It was. I quite loved it,” he says. “We were shooting in Rome and in Naples a little bit. I loved Tom. I thought he was so elegant in the way he shows up, but also with his warmth. He’s very surprisingly warm and tender. I had scenes with Adele, who’s extraordinary, and with Owen Cooper, and with George MacKay. A lot of great, great people. I think it’s going to be a beautiful film.”He sounds positively buoyant in his enthusiasm. With some justice. Note the name. Note the nose.Nino is in cinemas from Friday, June 19thIN THIS SECTION