In theaters since Wednesday, “La Petite” features a sixty-year-old facing the surrogate mother of his grandchild. The opportunity to focus on the journey of the interpreter of the latter, the Belgian actress Mara Taquin.
Just a few months after the horrific and anxiety-provoking La Tour, Guillaume Nicloux is back in a totally different register. La Petite, in theaters since September 20, follows a sixty-year-old who learns that his son and his companion have just died in an accident. The couple was expecting a child via a surrogate mother in Belgium. The future grandfather then decides to go and meet the young woman.
Facing Fabrice Luchini, in a more restrained role than usual, the general public discovers Mara Taquin, a young actress born in Brussels in 1997.
Daughter of a criminologist and a violin maker, she decided, when she was bored with her schooling, to take theater classes at the Brussels Academy. However, she did not intend to make comedy her career and it was by chance that she was spotted during a wild casting call. At 17, she had her first acting experience in the short film Créatures, a graduation film by Camille Mol about a teenager who discovers sexual desire.
Speaking to AlloCiné, she looks back on this meeting that turned her life upside down: “The cinema is a place that is not that accessible. So, I didn’t think about it. […] I thank Camille Mol because it’s a character that I never imagined playing, she’s a lunar, introverted girl. I discovered a family, I discovered what cinema was, I discovered people who are still my friends today. My life would never have been what it is if this woman had not seen that in me and for that I am deeply grateful.”
Listen to our entire interview with Mara Taquin, during the last Angoulême Festival:
These debuts were followed by appearances in short films, as well as on television, for an episode of Profiling. It was in 2019 that we saw her for the first time in the cinema, in the action comedy Walter and in Hors Normes by Eric Toledano and Olivier Nakache, where she plays an educator. A discreet role which nevertheless allows him to gain visibility and climb the steps of the Cannes Film Festival, where the feature film is presented at the closing of the 72nd edition.
Condor Distribution Mara Taquin in “Rien à fouter” with Adèle Exarchopoulos
After the Belgian detective series Public Enemy and the mini-series Le Mensonge, the actress returns to the Croisette in 2021 with Rien à foutre, selected for Critics’ Week. She plays the little sister of Adèle Exarchopoulos, a flight attendant for a low-cost airline whose life is nothing but an incessant headlong rush. Her performance earned her a Magritte nomination for Best Supporting Actress in 2023. She is also cited in the Best Actress category for La Ruche, in which she is the daughter of a bipolar woman, played by Ludivine Sagnier.
COADIC GUIREC / BESTIMAGE
Fabrice Luchini, Mara Taquin and director Guillaume Nicloux
In 2022, she is again in the credits of a Belgian detective series, this time titled Son of, where she plays the daughter of a gangster. She also plays opposite Isabelle Huppert in La Syndicaliste.
A few weeks ago, spectators were able to see her in The Beast in the Jungle, a free adaptation of Henry James, where she falls under the spell of Tom Mercier. And since Wednesday, it is with Fabrice Luchini that she shares the poster of La Petite.
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A film for which she didn’t even audition: Guillaume Nicloux invited her to Ghent, where he was doing location scouting, and met her over coffee, before telling her that she had the role. She remembers : “I realized that the role that Guillaume was offering me was important and it scared me all the more because I hadn’t been cast. He had never seen me play: was I going to get the shoulders for? I decided to make myself and trust him. After all, if he had chosen me, it was because he felt that I was capable of it.”
The director made no mistake: we will find Mara Taquin in Un Mohican, alongside Alexis Manenti; La Vocation, located in a psychiatric hospital; and the Sambre series, around the Sambre rapist.