Magnetic … Théodore Pellerin in Nino Photograph: © Blue Monday Productions - France 2 Cinéma View image in fullscreen Magnetic … Théodore Pellerin in Nino Photograph: © Blue Monday Productions - France 2 Cinéma Film Interview ‘The masturbation scene wasn’t a big deal’: Théodore Pellerin on tackling his new film Nino’s challenges Phil Hoad Locked out of his apartment, a cancer-stricken Parisian is caught in a race against time to freeze his sperm. The rising star who plays him explains how he tackled a very initimate quest
Prefer the Guardian on Google J ust six months after the world rallied to defend poor Paul Dano , vulnerability may now be a hot commodity for an actor. What is “weak sauce” for Quentin Tarantino, who attacked Dano, can be mighty savoury for others. So it’s good timing that Théodore Pellerin, with his gangly frame and huge eyes, exudes that quality in the new French character study Nino. Gauche, hesitant and withholding, Pellerin is magnetic as a young Parisian locked out of his apartment for a weekend after a papillomavirus (HPV)-related cancer diagnosis.
Pellerin explains Nino’s predicament, his inability to be candid with his loved ones, almost down to the cellular level. “His throat cancer isn’t insignificant,” he says. “It’s the part that links the head to the body. There’s a dissociation from the body – a distancing of his emotions. And because it comes from a sexually transmitted disease, his sexuality – a strong life force – is stunted too. So his mission is to speak and to ejaculate.” Urgently in the case of the latter: Nino must freeze his sperm as his treatment will make him infertile. His odyssey around Paris is the gen Z answer to French New Wave classic Cléo de 5 à 7 , which also revolved around a cancer diagnosis. Only this time, it’s about the impossibility of finding a good place to masturbate.
Reeling off his character’s diagnosis with cool self-assurance via a Zoom call from his home in Montréal, Canada, Pellerin doesn’t seem vulnerable in real life. Plaid shirt rolled up his forearms, with cropped brown hair and tidy oval glasses, he has the brisk air of a business student between lectures. He is actually between projects, waiting for a new shoot to begin in August having recently finished Tom Ford’s 18th-century drama Cry to Heaven.
His stock is rising fast, thanks not just to Nino but also to last year’s caustic psychological thriller Lurker, in which he played a parasocial LA hipster desperate to ingratiate himself with a pop star. In that film his vulnerability segues into a dangerous neediness, but it always seems to remain Pellerin’s centre of gravity. Even more strident roles – like a loose-cannon apprentice hoodlum in the 2018 Québécois crime film Family First , or the pyramid-scheme proselytiser tutoring Kirsten Dunst in the 2019 TV series On Becoming a God in Central Florida – have a disarming innocence.
Nino director Pauline Loquès, who also co-wrote the script, recognised that Pellerin has a particular quality. “Théodore had this ability to give life to silences,” she says. “They became charged with other dimensions – poetic, mysterious or psychological.” She insists that he understood the character she created better than her – quite a feat considering this was a very personal project, drawn from her outrage at the death from cancer, aged 37, of a family member she will only identify as “Romain”.
Pellerin pointed out that Nino is fundamentally a film about parenthood – which cam…