The tousle-haired star could be regarded as the quintessential Parisian actor – and now he’s taking on the city icon that looms largest
If Michael Caine is the quintessential London actor, Romain Duris could become his Paris equivalent. Born and raised in the city, he rose to international fame in 2005 playing the real-estate hustler with ambitions to be a pianist in Jacques Audiard’s The Beat That My Heart Skipped. Quick to the punch but nifty in his fingerwork, dropping rats in a sack on unwanted tenants while wearing Cuban heels, he was Parisian squalor and glamour in one snake-hipped paradox. Then he cashed in his tousle-haired bourgeois-bohème cachet in Christopher Honoré’s Dans Paris and Cédric Klapisch’s Paris. And now the pinnacle: he is starring in a new biopic about engineer Gustave Eiffel.
Duris couldn’t resist the man’s ubiquity. “I don’t know if it’s because I’m Parisian, but Eiffel is really a figure in France who matters,” he says. “He is everywhere – there are lots of Gustave Eiffel bridges, lots of buildings at the bottom of courtyards signed by him.” And, of course, that tower. The film shows the fraught atmosphere around the competition to design a showpiece exhibit for the 1889 Exposition Universelle; how Eiffel’s peers and the press deemed what was the world’s tallest structure at the time a dangerous act of hubris – and how he fought to make it happen.
