When he won the Un Certain Regard jury’s joint Best Actor prize for Harka in 2022, Adam Bessa wasn’t onstage to accept it. He’d figured he didn’t stand a chance, so he’d gone fishing in Marseille instead and was struggling with a seabass when the call came. He laughs. “‘You have to come back,’ they said. I was like, ‘Nah. I’m in the middle of nowhere right now, I can’t.’ So, I made a little video instead.”
This year, Bessa is back in Cannes with Critics’ Week opener Ghost Trail by Jonathan Millet. “It’s the story of a Syrian intellectual who was jailed during the civil war in Syria and now he’s chasing the man who tortured him. It’s based on a true story, about these guys who escaped from prison and tried to create a secret militia, a secret spy group.”
Though the character he plays is fictional, the story is deeply based on fact. “It’s maybe the darkest film I’ve ever done,” says Bessa. “This guy’s lost pretty much everything. He lost his wife and his daughter during the war, and he’s got nothing left except vengeance. I mean, he’s asking himself question, ‘Should I bring him to justice or should I kill him myself?’ It’s a question that I think is really, really interesting. When something bad has happened to you, do you try to break the cycle of vengeance, or do you create another circle?”
“It’s hard to explain,” he says. “It was not physically challenging, it was more mentally disturbing because it was really a dark place to work in, in order to find this character. Usually, darkness comes with melancholy, but, here, melancholy didn’t have a place. It was intense, but it was really interesting to dive into that.”
To do so, Bessa — who formed a duo called Illi several years ago — drew on his passion for music. “When I prepare a character, I always ask the director if he has a score already in mind, and then I make my own playlist for my own character,” he says. “But it’s really a way to get into the emotion of a film. For me, a film is a mood, really, that the audience is going to dive into.”
What was the playlist for Ghost Trail? “I think back there I was listening to lot of Armenian duduk and sufi music, really deep and mystical pieces. And in the same time I listened to Middle Eastern rap, to French rap, and to British drill, too, actually. So, some really dark music, but sometimes I’d put on something beautiful, like a violin piece, depending on the moment.”
The 32-year-old French Tunisian is doing pretty well right now, considering he only turned to acting at the age of 21 after a career in football didn’t work out. “I moved to Paris and then I started asking around,” he recalls. “How do you become Robert De Niro? I had no f*cking idea how to do it.” After a lot of hustling, he got an agent, and through that, he met the Russo brothers, who cast him first in Mosul then their Extraction series. “We have a great relationship,” he smiles. They’ve been like godfathers in the American industry. They’ve always been there for me.”
Currently waiting to see whether Amazon will go for another season of hit French series The Source, in which he stars as the outwardly respectable head of a cannabis-dealing crime family, Bessa has plenty in his life to be getting on with. So, what’s on his bucket list? “I’d like to meet Zinedine Zidane and play a little bit of football with him, and maybe do a film with Daniel Day Lewis. I heard Christopher Nolan is bringing him back from retirement. So, yeah, I guess I’d like to play football with Zidane, maybe swim with sharks, and act with Daniel Day Lewis.”
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