As the film Samba arrives on Disney +, we take the opportunity to ask you two or three questions about the career of Omar Sy with a quiz concocted with small onions.
Three years after the immense success of Intouchables which earned him the César for best actor, Omar Sy found the pair of directors Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano for the film Samba. A touching dramatic comedy in which the favorite French actor forms a nice duo with Charlotte Gainsbourg.
He plays Samba, a Senegalese who has lived in Paris for 10 years and works as a kitchen assistant in a hotel. But Samba is undocumented and lives illegally in the territory. When he applies for a residence permit after receiving a promise of employment, everything goes wrong and Samba is taken to an immigration detention center.
It was there that he met Alice, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, a young woman in full reconstruction. This former HRD is gradually reintegrating into the world of work by helping undocumented migrants with their legal procedures. Something will be tied between them which turns into a love story.
This role marks a new turning point in the career of the actor who here tackles a character with a much more dramatic content than in his previous films. It is also his first real composition role. Moreover, since we are talking about the roles of Omar Sy, will you be able to pass the quiz on his career without fail:
In an interview with Le Parisien when the film was released in theatres, Omar Sy confided that Samba was the role furthest from him:
“I was born in France, I am free, I look everyone in the eye. Samba lowers his head. When you don’t have papers, you have to make yourself very small for fear of being taken away and everything stopping. When you have this fear in your stomach all the time, you don’t have the same body, you don’t hold yourself the same. (…) He’s the character furthest from me that I’ve ever played: withdrawn, shy, not very talkative. I may have that in me, but I had never shown it.“
Samba is available on Disney+