Omar Sy
Omar Sy (born January 20, 1978, Trappes, France) is a French actor and producer who is known for his magnetism, warmth, and irresistible charm in a wide variety of roles in both French and English, ranging from sketch comedy to mystery to drama.
Sy, the third of eight children, was born and raised in Trappes, a banlieue outside Paris. His father had emigrated from Senegal and his mother from Mauritania. After completing secondary school in 1996, Sy began doing voice impressions in comedy sketches on Radio Nova (a station with international reach that focuses on world and other non-mainstream music) with a friend from his neighbourhood, the comic artist Jamel Debbouze. While working at the radio station, Sy met the comedian Fred Testot, and soon the two were performing comedy sketches on television as Omar and Fred. The comedy duo was well received, and in 2005 they began starring in the immensely popular comedy sketch show Service après-vente des émissions (“After-Sales Service of Emissions”) on France’s Canal +. It aired until 2012. As a result, Sy began to receive movie offers. He appeared in several film comedies, among them Nos jours heureux (2002; Those Happy Days) and Tellement proches (2009; “So Close”), both written and directed by Olivier Nakache and Éric Toledano. In 2007 Sy married his longtime girlfriend Hélène; the couple has five children.
When Nakache and Toledano decided to adapt an autobiographical story about a wealthy man who had become a quadriplegic as a result of a paragliding accident, they wrote the part of Driss, the man from the banlieues who becomes the wealthy man’s caretaker, for Sy. The resulting movie, Intouchables (2011; The Intouchables), was an enormous success in France and was wildly popular throughout Europe. It made Sy a star, and the exuberant warmth of his performance earned him a César award for best actor.
Sy continued to appear on television and in film comedies, including De l’autre côté du périph (2012; On the Other Side of the Tracks), about a pair of mismatched cops teaming up to solve a murder; Michel Gondry’s fantasy romance L’écume des jours (2013; Mood Indigo); and Nakache and Toledano’s romantic comedy Samba (2014). In 2012 Sy and his family moved to Los Angeles in order to, among other things, break into American movies, although he was less well known in Hollywood. Sy’s first such role was as the mutant Bishop in X-Men: Days of Future Passed (2014), and he also appeared in the action film Jurassic World (2015). He played a vengeful chef in the comedy Burnt (2015), starring Bradley Cooper.
Sy garnered more substantial roles in French films, however. He starred in a biography of a pioneering Black circus clown, Chocolat (2016), and he played a bachelor who suddenly finds that he is a father in the popular comedy Demain tout commence (2016; Two Is a Family). His other movies of the later 2010s include Knock (2017), in which he played a medical con man; Yao (2018), a road movie in which he portrayed a famous French actor visiting Senegal; and the submarine-set thriller Le chant du loup (2019; The Wolf’s Call). In 2020 Sy appeared with Harrison Ford in The Call of the Wild, acted in the mockumentary Tout simplement noir (Simply Black), and played the father in the family comedy Le prince oublié (The Lost Prince).
Sy later won widespread plaudits for his performance in the popular streaming series Lupin (2021– ), in which he took on the lead role of Assane Diop, a thief inspired by the classic French tales of Arsène Lupin by Maurice Leblanc; he also served as artistic producer on the series. In addition, he continued to act in such films as the action comedy Loin du périph (2022; The Takedown) and Jurassic World: Dominion (2022).