Same bumpy nose, same slightly mocking gaze, same half-trickster half-childish smile, same swaying gait… Victor Belmondo multiplies the points in common with his grandfather, the unforgettable Jean-Paul. When these similarities are pointed out to him, the young actor is not offended. Quite the contrary. “I am his grandson. I will not deny this heredity. But we also have a lot of differences,” he simply replies. And the actor listed three: “I’m much less carefree than him, I don’t have his popularity, I still have everything to prove! »

The actor, starring in Olivier Peyon’s new film (the adaptation of Philippe Besson’s novel, Stop with your lies, released in theaters on February 22), knows it… his difficulty will be to make a first name. But, as he himself admits: “It is the lot of every generation. And I’m not going to complain about having had Jean-Paul Belmondo as a grandpa. “From this national Bébel, who disappeared on September 6, 2021, the young man born in 1993 says he only keeps magical memories. “When I think of him, I especially come to images related to the backstage of the Variety Theater [que son grand-père had bought in 1991, NDLR]”, he confides.

“In 2003, my father played the role of a gangster in a short film. Its director, Régis Mardon, was looking for a child to play his son. I did screen tests and it was me who was taken. The few days of filming that followed were an immense pleasure. One scene particularly amuses him. “At one point in the film, the police were raiding our house [he played the son of a Yugoslav mobster, editor’s note]. During the search, the police ransacked my room and broke my toys. I loved living this moment of raw emotion. »

If his father, Paul, does not persevere in the cinema and becomes a racing driver, the young Victor decides, as for him, to continue in this way. He multiplies acting lessons, begins to watch films compulsively, reads everything about his favorite directors, starting with Martin Scorsese. To reassure his parents who keep telling him that the acting profession is uncertain, he agrees to go to a school specializing in film professions, “just to be able to retrain myself in case I don’t break through. During these studies [at Esec, editor’s note], I gradually oriented myself towards the “scenario” sector, because I have always been fascinated by the inventors of stories, “he continues.

However, it is with Albatros by Xavier Beauvois that Victor confirms that he is much more than the grandson of Jean-Paul Belmondo. In this drama, unfairly shunned by the public on its release, it indeed portrays a young policeman confronted with a series of difficult news items in the Pays de Caux. “A role specially written for him to the point that the character bore his first name, because this boy has crazy talent”, slips the director who had tested “the way he prints the film” on his previous film (Les Gardiennes, in 2017 ).

For Olivier Peyon, Victor Belmondo is now exploring a new register… more psychological. In Stop with your lies, he portrays the son of the former lover of a famous writer, in search of information on his parent. In this delicate role, the young actor shows impressive acting agility. Alternately charming and disturbing, seemingly serene before revealing the unfathomable grief that undermines him, he infuses his character of Lucas, torn by an intimate tragedy, with the necessary ambiguity to mark the spectators.

The young man, who will turn 30 next December, now has two dreams. The first ? Filming in Italy, the country of his mother, Luana Tenca, now a restaurateur who insisted on teaching him her native language. “Italy is all the more important to me because, on my grandfather’s side too, we are from the peninsula,” he slips. (The parents of the sculptor Paul Belmondo, his great-grandfather, are from Piedmont on one side and Sicily on the other, editor’s note). His second dream? Co-directing the film he wrote with Julie Gavras: a story that takes place in a theater and in which the boy says he slipped a lot of personal memories.