![]() Today he lives in a different world from many of the people he grew up with, a fact that he says spurs “sometimes guilt, of having succeeded while others have not. “We always knew it existed, but we didn’t ever see it,” he said then. Growing up in a Black immigrant family, he was shut out of white, rich France. “There are two Frances that exist side by side,” Sy told me back in 2012, after Intouchables came out. remake called The Upside, with Kevin Hart and Bryan Cranston.įor all his happiness and success, the theme of Lupin remains deeply familiar to Sy from his own life experience-the schism between wealth and poverty, and its close overlap in France with race. ![]() The movie remains France’s biggest-ever global hit, grossing more than $426 million worldwide, and Sy became the first Black male artist ever to win the Best Actor César, France’s equivalent to the Academy Award. While some American critics questioned its treatment of Black characters (Variety accused it of “Uncle Tom racism”), French audiences lapped it up. It was in 2011 that his fame exploded domestically with the movie Intouchables, in which he plays an ex-con from a poor, majority Black banlieue-much like his real hometown-who lands a job tending to a spectacularly wealthy, white quadriplegic in Paris’ glittering center. He launched his career with comedy sketches on radio, but became a national star during the 2000s, as one half of a comic duo, Omar et Fred, that did nightly two-minute acts on France’s Canal Plus TV. Sy was drawn to acting in order “to transcend a form of shyness,” he says. His Senegalese father worked in an auto factory and his Mauritanian mother was a building cleaner. ![]() He was raised in a housing project in the underprivileged exurb of Trappes, 20 miles west of Paris, one of seven children. Like his character in Lupin, Sy came from humble beginnings. Read more: The Best Result of the Streaming Boom? America Finally Loves Foreign-Language TV “Whether you’re Black, Asian or Caucasian, people saw him and said, ‘That’s who I want to root for,’” he says. “To have Omar represent humanity this year, it just made sense to people,” says the filmmaker Louis Leterrier, who directed the first three episodes, and is a close friend of Sy. It is what is happening in real life.”Īppearing in the midst of pandemic lockdowns and a push for racial equity, Assane is a new breed of hero to match the current moment. ![]() “What we say in the series is not an invention. ![]() “People will just pass by you without seeing you,” he says. “There is a category of person in France, people who have specific jobs, but who we never stop to consider,” Sy (pronounced See) tells TIME in a Zoom interview in May while relaxing in a hotel in Grenoble, France. Sy says the experience, about which he posted on his Instagram feed, was illuminating. Sy even asked one person for assistance, yet still no one recognized him. Incredibly, the commuters took no notice of one of France’s biggest movie stars. In the Metro, in real life, Sy began pasting a giant poster advertising the show on a billboard space on the platform. In the show, Sy plays a thief who takes a job as a night cleaner at the museum in order to plot a spectacular heist under the noses of white curators who are barely aware of a Black janitor. In January, when Netflix launched its wildly popular French TV series Lupin, its star Omar Sy went into the Metro station under the Louvre in Paris. ![]()
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