The 49th César ceremony crowned Franco-Belgian Arieh Worthalter best actor for his interpretation of Pierre Goldman in “The Goldman Trial” by Cédric Kahn.
Stunning as Pierre Goldman in Cédric Kahn’s film, The Goldman Trial, Arieh Worthalter received the César for Best Actor from Benoît Magimel. An award which also recognizes the critical and public success of this film – more than 350,000 admissions in theaters.
A multilingual actor
Born in Paris to a Belgian mother and a French father, Arieh Worthalter studied drama at INSAS (National Higher Institute of Performing Arts and Broadcasting Techniques) in Brussels and at the Brussels Film Academy. New York. He first appeared on screen in 2009 in Somewhere Between Here and Now. Multiplying his participations in short films, we find him in 2015 in the historical drama The Anarchists, alongside Tahar Rahim and Adèle Exarchopoulos.
Polyglot (he speaks English, Spanish, French, Hebrew and Dutch), Arieh Worthalter is as comfortable in action B series (Bastille Day, directed by Idris Elba), as in lyrical drama (Éternité by Vietnamese Tran Anh Hung), the biopic (Marie Curie) or the anticipation (the Arte Transferts series).
The meeting with Lukas Dhont
The actor stood out in 2018 in Girl, Lukas Dhont’s first sensitive feature film on transidentity. Arieh Worthalter plays the father of a teenage girl, Lara, née Victor, who dreams of becoming a ballerina. A true sensation of the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, Girl won the Caméra d’or, the Un Certain Regard Acting Prize and the Queer Palm, while the actor’s performance was recognized by the Magritte (the Belgian Césars) for best supporting actor . A prize that Worthalter received again the following year for Duelles.
After Pearl, Douze Mille and À Coeur Battant, we find him again in an intimate drama in 2021 with Serre Moi Fort by Mathieu Amalric, where he plays the companion of Vicky Krieps. The following year, he showed a much more disturbing side in Hunted, where he stalked a young woman through the woods.
The Goldman revelation
He can also be found starring in another grueling feature film, Bowling Saturne by Patricia Mazuy, which explores toxic masculinity and the legacy of violence. The actor plays a police officer who investigates a series of murders while reconnecting with his half-brother, a young man on the margins.
In 2023, Arieh Worthalter shines in The Goldman Trial, which opens the Cinematographers’ Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival. In front of Cédric Kahn’s camera, the actor impresses in the role of far-left activist Pierre Goldman, sentenced at first instance to life imprisonment for four armed robberies, the last of which resulted in the death of two women and for which he maintains his innocence.