Aurélien Recoing

Aurélien Recoing (born 5 May 1958 in Paris, France) is a celebrated French actor and stage director whose career spans over four decades of theatrical and cinematic achievement. He began his artistic training in 1974 at the renowned Cours Florent and later refined his craft at the Quartier d'Ivry, before earning a place at the Conservatoire national supérieur d'art dramatique in Paris in 1977, where he studied under the guidance of Jean‑Pierre Miquel and Antoine Vitez. Recoing quickly established himself on the French stage, appearing in more than thirty productions and directing ambitious renditions of works by Thomas Bernhard, Fernando Pessoa and Paul Claudel, a versatility that earned him the prestigious Prix Gérard Philipe in 1989. His transition to film started modestly with a role in Exploits of a Young Don Juan (1980), but his affinity for art‑house cinema led him to collaborate with auteurs such as Philippe Garrel in Emergency Kisses and Laurence Ferreira Barbosa in Modern Life. The turning point of his screen career arrived in 2001 when he delivered a haunting performance as a man constructing a false identity in Laurent Cantet’s Time Out (L'Emploi du Temps), a role that brought him widespread recognition and cemented his reputation as a compelling character actor. Since then he has effortlessly moved between commercial blockbusters like Ruby & Quentin and critically acclaimed independent projects, including Géla Babluani’s monochrome thriller 13 Tzameti, Maïwenn’s Forgive Me, and Florent Emilio Siri’s Intimate Enemies. Recoing’s imposing physical presence and linguistic fluency in English and a smattering of Russian have allowed him to inhabit diverse roles ranging from a World War I soldier in Fragments of Antonin to a weary farmer in Abdellatif Kechiche’s Palme d’Or‑winning Blue Is the Warmest Colour. In recent years he has continued to expand his repertoire, appearing in Adults in the Room (2020) and the Arte production Grand Ciel, while also venturing behind the camera; his directorial short The Rifleman (Un Bon Tireur) won the Best Drama award in 2021 and he is currently developing his first feature film Naked Hands (À Mains Nues) with Sensito Films. Throughout his prolific career, Aurélien Recoing has remained a steadfast figure in French cultural life, drawing on a rich family heritage of performers—his father Alain was a puppeteer and his siblings Éloi, Blaise and David are respectively a director‑translator, an actor‑musician and a pianist‑composer—underscoring his deep‑seated commitment to the performing arts.