She has become thoroughly Parisian since but never lost her roots. Both films tap into her Algerian heritage: Khoudri was born in Algiers in 1992 but had to flee with her parents when she was two because of the country’s civil war. If she is little known abroad for now, she is a big thing back home, most notably thanks to two films, ‘Les Bienheureux’ and ‘Papicha’ – she won a best actress award at the 2017 Venice Film Festival for the former (not bad for her first film) and a most promising actress César, the French equivalent of an Oscar, for the latter. Khoudri is, with Chalamet, part of a new generation of stars who will one day replace Murray, Owen Wilson and co. “Frances was saying, ‘It’s me who passes the baton…’” So to speak.Īt the risk of being trite, you could say that McDormand is passing on another type of baton too.
“I was, like, ‘I’m not part of it, I think?’” Luckily McDormand told them what was what.
“At the start we didn’t get it either,” the 29-year-old Khoudri laughs of the surprising ménage à trois. Ouff! It’s a lot to take in, I know – it is Anderson after all. Finally, she also features in the most unlikely love triangle you’ll see this year, as Juliette squares off for her man – Chalamet’s brooding rebel Zeffirelli – against his cougar lover, played by no less than Frances McDormand. Next, she has to shine from beneath a ginormous retro motorcycle helmet, which her character, Juliette, wears at all times – a stroppy student activist from the Swinging Sixties, she is always buzzing off furiously somewhere demanding utopian rights. In the king of kook’s latest film, a love letter to journalism, France and all things quintessentially Anderson, the little-known French-Algerian actress first has to stake a claim for herself in an insanely starry ensemble that includes Bill Murray, Timothée Chalamet, Benicio Del Toro, Tilda Swinton and Elisabeth Moss. Lyna Khoudri has her work cut out for her in Wes Anderson’s ‘The French Dispatch’.
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