She disturbed you in Grave, scarred you in Tokyo Vice, and intrigued you in Succession. Today, she bursts onto Cannes screens in “Le Théorème de Marguerite”, a fascinating feature film by Anna Novion. We tell you all about the essential Ella Rumpf.
You probably know the series and films in which she has played, but her face is not completely familiar to you. For what ? Because in each of her roles, she changes appearance to the point of doubt, sometimes rebellious, cannibalistic, fragile or fatal woman. Or here, young girl behind her glasses, erased. It was in Cannes that we met her.
An actress who likes to hide behind her characters
After disturbing on the poster of Julia Ducournau’s Grave, fascinated in the Tokyo Vice series, or even visiting the world of Succession, Ella Rumpf dazzled the Croisette on the poster of Marguerite’s Théorème, in the skin of a brilliant researcher in Mathematics at the ENS, who, after an error detected during the presentation of her thesis, sees her certainties collapse. She then decides to leave everything to (re)start living.
Knowing how to install with finesse the atmosphere that reigns within the Grandes Ecoles, the confinement and blindness to the world that results when work counts at all costs, Anna Novion’s film presented in Special Screenings, paints with acuity a atypical heroine, “funny” in the astonishing sense of the term, trying to find a place in a world where feelings have no place in the face of the tangibility of figures and the quest for ultimate scientific truth.
A heroine that her interpreter did not want “to fit” and that she built through discussions with her director, aiming among other things to find her look and “his slippers” as much as “its nuances of humour”, in order to alleviate the demanding subject of Mathematics.
A subject for which the viewer is immediately passionate without needing to be keen on the subject, embarked in spite of himself alongside this hardline and clumsy character, who crosses the world and interacts with others not without difficulty. . Uncomfortable in her personal life as much as rigid in her professional life (inhabited by an implacable Jean-Pierre Daroussin), Marguerite will see her framed universe gradually wither away, made of well-arranged geometric lines, as the feelings and THE meeting (with the charismatic Julien Frison) will make everything overflow.
It is because the reflection on the look and the posture are at the heart of her work of incarnation that Ella Rumpf manages to walk us in the world “no frills” of her heroine, eager to “putting order into infinity” in order to silence his original anxieties.
“I love playing with it, overdoing it a bit, having the right to get lost in another world.” “To walk like on a line, not to fall, to find the right balance, to transform this character, to discover its path by trying things”, this is the hardest and most important thing according to this young actress-chameleon, who also likes to hide behind her characters to better tell their story.
A chameleon and eclectic actress, on all fronts
“I don’t want to show myself too much. I actually started the cinema with a shaved head in the film Chrieg. Removed from my feminine appearance, I began my relationship to my femininity and my profession in a rather particular way”she ends up confiding in us. “Shy”she is mostly described “naive” in its infancy, always wanting to make films or to act in films and having put it into it with innocence, by simply looking for casting directors.
“It was while growing up that I realized that it was a complex, non-superficial profession, a research profession that I greatly appreciate”. A profession that she likes to explore from every angle and on all fronts, moving without complex from the provocative auteur cinema of Julia Ducournau to the renowned and demanding series that are tokyo vice or even Succession in which she made a remarkable appearance.
Succession on OCS: did you recognize this actress from Grave in season 3?
“Serious, it was a great first film for all of us and which united us, where we exceeded a certain limit but without thinking about it. The memory of certain scenes comes later! I was and I am proud to be part of of this work which stays in people’s minds, which continues to travel, which left its mark and which we still talk about. I did not immediately capture the journey that the film took because I returned to Switzerland, Germany and I turned left to right”.
Left to right and straight ahead above all, because it was at this point that she entered the varied world of series: German police (Freud), Japanese (Tokyo Vice) or American (Succession).
“I joined this universe in a natural way, without anticipating, very happy to be part of it and to discover completely different worlds, especially with tokyo vice and Japan, a rather exceptional experience to enter this world of the yakusa of the 90s”.
When asked about her predilections, she replies without hesitation that she watches more films than series that take up too much of her time… which she doesn’t have. “I like to go to a room and watch a movie on the big screen, I am a benevolent spectator who likes when movies resonate with you”. Like those that it proposes and embodies itself on a European and little by little international scale.