Déborah Lukumuena trained for months at a wrestling club in Paris in order to play a wrestler and bodyguard for her latest hit film, Robust. She noticed that in a match there would often be one minute of combat that “was very intense, very physical” and outside that, “you have to find a way to use your breath to keep calm”. Her performance as Aïssa, the personal protection officer for an erratic, ageing film star, has been lauded by French critics for its mesmerising serenity and imposing physical presence. “Sometimes the greatest outer shell can hide the greatest inner softness,” she says.
Lukumuena, 27, is considered one of the best French actors of her generation. Aged 22, she became the first black woman, and the youngest ever actor, to win a best supporting role César – France’s equivalent to the Oscar – for the suburban Paris high-rise thriller Divines. Since then, she has carefully chosen her roles – from a troubled theatre actor in Anaïs Volpé’s The Braves to a burger-bar worker who reacts to a customer hitting his partner in the short-film series H24. She is now breaking into English, starring in Girl, the first feature from acclaimed Glasgow-based writer and director Adura Onashile; she plays a mother who creates an isolated world with her 11-year-old daughter.
