9 future Oscar winners
And the movies that will make them.
Sometimes, at the movie theater, you see a face flash across a 30-foot-tall screen and feel like you’re witnessing someone’s dream coming true. At film festivals, where small movies meet big audiences, stars are made too. I was at Cannes when American Honey star Sasha Lane transformed from a girl on the beach in Miami, where director Andrea Arnold found her, into one of Hollywood’s hot new things. Nearly a decade later, in the very same room, a similar thing happened: Anora transformed Mikey Madison into an Oscar winner.
It’s a unique feeling, seeing someone’s own history being formed right in front of them, but one that’s happened quite a few times at the Cannes Film Festival this year. As I watched the movies (25 of them, you can read my thoughts here), I took mental notes of the young actors that moved me, in films from France, Nigeria, Great Britain, Germany, and more. Then, as they soaked up the spirit of the Croisette—most for the very first time—I interviewed them.
India Amarteifio, 24, from Clarissa
India Amarteifio arrived in Cannes as one kind of star—the highly followed, super successful lead of the Bridgerton spin-off Queen Charlotte—and left it having earned some new bonafides. Clarissa, the new film from twin brothers Arie and Chuko Esiri,shot in Nigeria late last year on lustrous 16mm film and is a contemporary riff on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. Transposed into modern day Lagos, it’s a story of a high society woman preparing for a party while looking back on her youth, and the figures that have both drifted from, and stayed with her. Amarteifio, 24, plays the flashback version of Sophie Okonedo’s Clarissa; her castmates include Ayo Edebiri and Toheeb Jimoh. It’s Amarteifio’s first foray into independent film. “This is what I’ve always wanted to do,” she says. “If I can pinpoint the trajectory of how I’d like my career to go, this is what I want to be doing: A piece of art where you just sit and go with it.”
The film was shot in Abraka, where the Erisi twins were raised, hours away from Lagos, so the cast spent most of their time together. “We ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner together, and went on our own adventures in the day,” Amarteifio says. Despite playing the younger version of Okonedo, the pair didn’t meet until they ran into each other in Soho the week before the film’s premiere. “She stopped on her bike to say hello.”
Amarteifio is Ghanaian, but being in Africa for her first job there helped her root herself more firmly in her culture. She’s planning a trip to Ghana later this year. “For me, the film is trying to help you come away with a better understanding of Nigeria, and to help you look inwards. To contemplate your own decisions. It’s kind of existential.”
Paul Kircher, 24, from Orange Flavoured Wedding
Paul Kircher played a lost teenager caught in a trap of violence in the 2024 movie And Their Children After Them, and won the newcomer prize at the Venice Film Festival for it. With the win he followed in the footsteps of its past recipients: Taylor Russell and Jennifer Lawrence. In France, he’s already a star, their homegrown Timothee Chalamet, with a high fashion deal (he’s a Dior boy), tousled hair, and a fellow actor sibling ( Samuel Kircher, who played the teenage protagonist in the crazy family sex drama Last Summer). Kircher, just 24 years old, is now three Cannes’ deep.He arrived this time on the Croisette with two movies in the same year. One is the animated high school love story In Waves, scored by Oklou; the other is his third collaboration with France’s GOAT of queer cinema, Christophe Honore.
Set in 1970s Nantes, Orange Flavoured Wedding is a semi-autobiographical story of two lovers on their wedding day, which unbeknownst to them acts as the fraction point in their future lives. Kircher plays Jacques, the soon-to-be husband. “He’s sort of a ghost-like character, like in Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire,” he tells me. “My character loves his family very much, but doesn’t want to replicate the pattern of violence that runs through it.” The film reunites him also with Adele Exarchopoulos (Blue is the Warmest Colour), who plays his sister. “She has so much tenderness,” he says. “She impresses me so much.”
Jay Lycurgo, 28, from I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning
Jay Lycurgo is a lad from Croydon, South London. He’s a BIFA winner, a once-upon-a-time DC Comics boy (the TV series Titans), and, according to my actor friends whose taste I trust, one of the best young actors working right now. After a stellar one-two performance punch in Netflix’s drama Steve, then a part in the Peaky Blinders movie, he arguably delivers his best work yet in I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning.
The social realist drama by Clio Barnard, which premiered to a slew of starry reviews in Cannes’ Director’s Fortnight strand, follows a group of five Birmingham friends who’ve hit 30 and realize their lives have gone nowhere. Lycurgo, 28, plays Oli—a boy who’s wound up becoming a drug dealer. But he bears none of the snarling cliches of that kind of character; he’s as much of a victim as those he sells to, desperate to survive and do something better with his life.
“You really get driven by anxiety sometimes on these things,” he says, “Because I can’t think of anything worse than to be in front of a camera and not know my accent.” Lycurgo studied the rhymes of the Brummy rapper Jaykae to pin down the accent. As for his mannerisms? Pete Doherty in the throes of his addiction. “I watched documentary footage of that trance that he was in, and it just helped me a lot to be accurate with it.” He pins down the perfect balance of frenzy and lethargy. “Especially when you’re talking about something so sensitive, with addiction, you want to be respectful.”
The film shot in Birmingham with a smattering of locals, as is Barnard’s custom as a director. In his downtime, Lycurgo hung out with his castmates, including Anthony Boyle (who gatecrashes our chat) and Daryl McCormack. He and McCormack went to church together. The film acted as its own kind of savior for Lycurgo. “I felt quite lost mentally myself at the time when we were shooting, very insecure,” he admits. “But it’s funny how that can work—feeling how the character’s feeling. Oli feels depressed, but he puts a big smile on his face. I feel like I had a bit of that going on.”
“But I love that,” Lycurgo adds. “Clio created this space for us to really let go. You need a place sometimes to scream. Being Oli was that for me, but instead of screaming, I was dancing.”
Naomi Cosma, 25, from I’ll Be Gone in June
For a long time, Naomi Cosma did not want to appear in I’ll Be Gone in June. “The director Katarina Rivilis reached out to me, was like, ‘Hey, do you want to come to the audition?’ And I was like, ‘No.” Cosma says bluntly, on the terrace of the Palais du Festivals. The film, set in a rural New Mexico town immediately after 9/11, is about the listlessness of teen existence in a jingoistic America. The lead character Franny, played by Cosma, is a 16-year-old exchange student, visiting for a year from Germany, just as the planes hit the towers.
“As a queer non-binary person, it’s not the most accepting place in the world, especially in the south,” Cosma says of their time in the States. The deserts made them feel “a little lost.” But they came away from the film with a new group of friends in their co-stars (who are also, largely, first time actors), and a brief but beautiful relationship that’s now cemented into their own coming-of-age. As Cosma puts it: “I was pretty much living the script.”
Rivilis had seen a photo of Cosma in a magazine, taken by their ex-boyfriend, and thought it was taken in the ’90s. When Rivilis learned of Cosma’s identity, they became the missing piece of the movie’s puzzle. Rivilis wouldn’t stop until Cosma had agreed to take on the part. They shot it in New Mexico in February 2024, with Wim Wenders on board as a producer, who Cosma calls “a sweet guy.” The movie has the air of an early Gus Van Sant film, all of the gorgeous scuzz of small town America.
Talha Akdogan, 19, from Butterfly Jam
Talha Akdogan was just a regular teenager, wrestling in his local New Jersey gym, when a casting director walked in and changed his life. They were looking for someone to appear in the new movie from Kantemir Balagov, the Russian director who became an arthouse darling off the back of his last project, 2019’s award-winning Beanpole. Now, the filmmaker was coming Stateside, and although Akdogan didn’t know it yet, he would be auditioning to play the son of an Oscar nominee. A few auditions later, after meeting Balagov, he got the part, and flew to northern France to shoot it.
The movie, called Butterfly Jam, is the story of a young Circassian high schooler named Pyteh, living in New Jersey with his volatile father Azik, played by Barry Keoghan. Pyteh’s mother is absent, and so he relies on his aunt, played by Riley Keough, for real understanding. In the film, Akdogan says, “they’re all each other’s God. Azik and Pyteh both want to see each other succeed, so they have to take care of each other.” It’s a film about the American dream; Akdogan, who was born in Kazakhstan and raised in Wayne, New Jersey, is living his own. Having just turned 18, he’s currently in college studying Film and TV production, but fancies stepping in front of the camera one more time. He’s a big Game of Thrones fan, he says. “Any parts in the spin-offs, let me know.”
Embla Berntsen Stridbeck, 16, from Low Expectations
In Norwegian director Eivind Landsvik’s debut feature Low Expectations, we meet a pop star whose career has been derailed by burnout, forcing her to move back in with her mother. As a temp job, she’s become a high school invigilator, a comparatively dead-end job rubbing shoulders with teenagers. Only one of the girls there recognizes her, and they strike up a friendship. That girl is Aida, a dance student played by 16-year-old Embla Berntsen Stridbeck.
“I got a text from my friend saying ‘My mom is forcing me to do this audition. You gotta join me,’” Stridbeck recalls. She remembers those early conversations being a little shaky (“I think I got the character’s name wrong!”) but eventually beat out her friends for the part. In the movie, Aida is a girl on the precipice of a creative career, coming face to face with someone who’s been scorned by it. Aida is “nice, sweet, desperate to be liked,” she says. She helped form the character with some early meetings with the pop star at its center, played by the real life pop star Marie Ulven, known better as Girl in Red. “It was very funny, because my friend had been to her concert and she met her girlfriend there. I thought about that when I met her for the first time, then told her that story!”
Currently at dance school, and with a modest collection of screen credits in television, this is Stridbeck’s first film role. “I feel more comfortable with dancing,” she admits, but she hopes some more dramatic parts will come her way.
Colas Quignard,19; Mitia Capellier-Audat, 23; and Suzanne Gerin, 19 (left to right), from La Gradiva
Perhaps the biggest surprise this year was the break-out success of a quiet film that premiered in the Critics’ Week sidebar. Marine Altan’s La Gradiva, a French debut running at a languorous two-and-a-half hours, is about a group of students visiting Pompeii and Naples on a school trip. Typically, films of its style would have passed under the radar there, but it left the festival with a slate of glowing reviews and the same hot distributor that handled the Charli xcx movie Erupcja.
At its centre are a trio of kids–Colas Quignard, Suzanne Gerin, and Mitia Capellier-Audat–who have never acted before, anchoring this gorgeous story of the confusing, violent nature of teen existence. Quignard, 19, first met Altan when “she had come to Naples to rewrite her screenplay with Anne Brouillet—they wanted to be more faithful to the way young people speak.” Quignard’s vernacular played into that, and “at the end of the trip she took my number, and we saw each other about ten times for casting.” He plays the film’s murky and opaque lead.
19-year-old Gerin, for whom this feels like an Adele Exarchopoulos in Blue is the Warmest Colour-level discovery, called making the film “a powerful and precious experience.” It reinforced the idea for her that “acting is something collective.” She auditioned as a bit of a joke and ended up getting the part. Capellier-Audat, 23, who rounds out the central trio as an energetic scuzzball, was cast after he was spotted at a protest. “I was very anxious about being filmed, but also about being around so many people for such a long time, particularly people I didn’t know,” he says.
All of them have to finish their studies before they contemplate their futures. Quignard is studying theatre in Paris, Gerin is not focussed on acting for now. Cappelier-Audat plans to “finish my sociology degree all the way through, and to keep on fighting for a society where all the forms of violence we see through the film no longer exist.”
