Performer
A performer whose catalogue work here is strong, with the fuller case still to be made.
Nutevio rank
#13331
of 909177 performers
Top 5%
Denis Podalydès represents the rare performer whose career became more ambitious with every decade — 31 years in, and Denis is still choosing the harder script.
The essay
Our editors on the work, the patterns and the reason this body of work holds together.
Denis Podalydès appears in 29 films in the Nutevio catalogue, and none of them would work the same way without Denis. Apollo 11 : Retour vers la lune is the clearest case: a film rated 8.0 by our editors, where the performance carries weight the script only implies.
The recognisable elements are versatility, transformation, quiet performance. Watch two of these films back to back and the method separates from the material — the same instrument, tuned differently for action, comedy, drama. It is a style built on what is withheld as much as what is played.
Working with Franck Dubosc, Bertrand Usclat, Jeanne Herry and others, Denis Podalydès helped set a standard other performers now audition against. Awards bodies have been slower than the work, which is usually the sign of a career built on choices rather than campaigns.
Apollo 11 : Retour vers la lune (2019) as Narrator · The Most Precious of Cargoes (2024) as Man with the Broken Face (voice) · See You Up There (2017) as The Minister (voice)
Career snapshot
Ranked #13331 of 909177 performers tracked in the Nutevio library.
Films in Nutevio
29
1996–2027
Career length
31 yrs
Measured across our catalogue
Academy Awards
—
Unknown
Oscar nominations
—
Unknown
Highest Nutevio score
8.0
Apollo 11 : Retour vers la lune
Average Nutevio score
5.3
Across catalogue work
Highest IMDb rating
8.0
Apollo 11 : Retour vers la lune
Most frequent director
Franck Dubosc
1 film together
Longest collaboration
1×
With Franck Dubosc
Most common genre
Comedy
16 titles
Average runtime
1h 31m
Across catalogue work
Golden Globe wins
—
Unknown
Nutevio metric
Ten weighted categories, applied identically to everyone we cover.
Nutevio Performer Score
6.8
out of 10
A performer whose catalogue work here is strong, with the fuller case still to be made.
Nutevio metric
Cultural impact and legacy, measured separately from craft — how far the work travelled once it left the cinema.
Nutevio Influence Score
6.3
out of 10
A quieter influence — felt inside the films rather than across the industry.
How far the work travelled past the people who saw it first.
What survives once the release-week conversation has burned off.
Institutional acknowledgement, weighted but never decisive.
Years of chosen, relevant work rather than years merely employed.
Statuettes, read as evidence rather than verdict.
Roles named without needing the film named alongside them.
Directors who wrote parts because this performer existed.
The reading other performers now have to answer.
Actor DNA
A fingerprint derived from the roles themselves — register, range and the kind of film they carry.
The shape of a career
Every performance plotted in time. Hover a point to read the title behind it.
Peak years
Where the scores, the awards and the sheer volume of work agree with each other.
Best decade
1990s
7.2 average MV
The 1990s are where the work and the material meet. La Belle Verte — the run our editors reach for first when the argument is about range rather than fame.
Highest average Nutevio score
1990s
7.2
Across 1 catalogue film in this decade, our scores never drop below the level a career is judged on.
Highest average IMDb rating
1990s
7.2
The public agrees most strongly about this stretch — useful context, and occasionally a decade behind our own reading.
Most awarded era
1990s
0 Academy Awards
Statuettes for the films themselves, which is the honest way to read an ensemble career. La Belle Verte.
Most productive era
2020s
19 films
The busiest stretch of the catalogue — volume that reads as appetite rather than availability.
Range, mapped
Genres down the side, decades across the top. Warmer cells mean stronger titles.
| Genre | 1990s | 2000s | 2010s | 2020s |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Drama | — | 6.51 film | 5.54 films | 5.210 films |
| Action | — | — | — | 0.01 film |
| Thriller | — | 6.71 film | 7.11 film | — |
| Comedy | 7.21 film | 6.51 film | 5.93 films | 5.511 films |
| Crime | — | — | 7.51 film | 6.12 films |
| Romance | — | — | — | 5.63 films |
| Horror | — | — | — | 6.01 film |
Chronology
Firsts and peaks
The turning points, in the order they happened.
First film in Nutevio
1996La Belle Verte
Where our catalogue meets this career, as Papapote.
Highest rated performance · Career peak
2019Apollo 11 : Retour vers la lune
8.0 on the Nutevio scale, the top of the catalogue for this performer. Weighing billing against the film's own quality, this is the point where everything aligned at once.
Most recent film
The current state of the argument, as Marc Vadé.
Our order
Every performance in the catalogue, ordered by Nutevio Score.
Every title
Filter by genre or decade, and compare any two titles side by side.
29 of 29 films
as Man with the Broken Face (voice)
Directed by Unknown
as François
Directed by Unknown
as The Minister (voice)
Directed by Albert Dupontel
From the library
Every movie and TV credit stored for this name in the Nutevio catalogue — filter by media, role or sort by rating.
Loading credits…
The defining work
#1
Narrator
Apollo 11 : Retour vers la lune (2019)
Performance score8.2
The performance the rest of the career is read through. Narrator gives Denis Podalydès a structure to work against, and the film hands over its centre of gravity without hesitation.
View movie#2
Man with the Broken Face (voice)
The Most Precious of Cargoes (2024)
Performance score8.0
The Most Precious of Cargoes asks for something the previous films did not, and gets it. Man with the Broken Face (voice) is played without a single line of pleading for the audience's sympathy — which is exactly why it lands.
View movie#3
Henri Gautier
Rise (2022)
Performance score7.7
Rise asks for something the previous films did not, and gets it. Henri Gautier is played without a single line of pleading for the audience's sympathy — which is exactly why it lands.
View movie#4
François
La Belle Époque (2019)
Performance score7.5
La Belle Époque asks for something the previous films did not, and gets it. François is played without a single line of pleading for the audience's sympathy — which is exactly why it lands.
View movieStart here
A guided path through the work, ordered so each film explains the next.
Best entry point
as Narrator
Start here. Apollo 11 : Retour vers la lune is the clearest statement of what Denis Podalydès does — accessible, 0 minutes, and rated 8.0 by our editors. No context required.
Our editors order this path by accessibility first and chronology second. You meet Denis at the most legible performance, then move forward in time so each film reads as a response to the one before it rather than a repetition of it.
See You Up There (2017)
A deliberate change of key after Apollo 11 : Retour vers la lune — same instrument, unfamiliar tuning, and the reason range gets mentioned.
La Belle Époque (2019)
Keeps the drama register of See You Up There but asks for a colder reading of it.
Rise (2022)
Same director as La Belle Époque, different problem to solve. Watching them in order shows how much of the effect was the collaboration.
The Most Precious of Cargoes (2024)
Same director as Rise, different problem to solve. Watching them in order shows how much of the effect was the collaboration.
Company kept
The directors and performers this career keeps returning to.
Ron Howard
Director
1 film together
Notably The Da Vinci Code
Andrei Konchalovsky
Director
1 film together
Notably To Each His Own Cinema
Albert Dupontel
Director
1 film together
Notably See You Up There
Roman Polanski
Director
1 film together
Notably An Officer and a Spy
Gustave Kervern
Director
1 film together
Notably Delete History
Stéphane Foenkinos
Director
1 film together
Notably Fantasies
Jeanne Herry
Director
1 film together
Notably All Your Faces
Bertrand Usclat
Director
1 film together
Notably Comédie-Française
Franck Dubosc
Director
1 film together
Notably 5H48, Place des Martyrs
Behind the camera
Who casts this performer, how often, and what the pairing produces.
Albert Dupontel
Director
1 film together · 7.5 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
See You Up ThereJeanne Herry
Director
1 film together · 7.4 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
All Your FacesRoman Polanski
Director
1 film together · 7.1 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
An Officer and a SpyBertrand Usclat
Director
1 film together · 6.9 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
Comédie-FrançaiseRon Howard
Director
1 film together · 6.7 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
The Da Vinci CodeAndrei Konchalovsky
Director
1 film together · 6.5 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
To Each His Own CinemaStéphane Foenkinos
Director
1 film together · 5.1 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
FantasiesGustave Kervern
Director
1 film together · 5.0 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
Delete HistoryFranck Dubosc
Director
1 film together · 0.0 avg MV
One film, but the kind that reorganises how a performer is cast afterwards.
Best film together
5H48, Place des MartyrsSix degrees
Follow the thread outward — director, film, co-star, and the film after that.
Categories of our own
Six editorial categories we apply to every performer we cover.
Most rewatchable
See You Up There
as The Minister (voice)
The one that survives a fourth viewing. Nothing in the performance depends on surprise, which is why it keeps paying out.
Most emotional performance
The Most Precious of Cargoes
as Man with the Broken Face (voice)
Grief played at conversational volume. The film never asks the audience to cry; the performance simply makes it difficult not to.
Most influential performance
Apollo 11 : Retour vers la lune
as Narrator
You can hear this reading in other actors' auditions a decade later — the surest measure of influence there is.
Best ensemble performance
To Each His Own Cinema
as The manager (segment "Cinéma de boulevard")
Work that makes everyone else in the frame better without ever pulling the camera towards itself.
Career defining performance
Apollo 11 : Retour vers la lune
as Narrator
If the career had to be argued in a single scene, our editors would pick one from this film and rest the case.
In their films' words
“You can build a whole film around a performer who knows when not to speak. Denis Podalydès has known it for a long time.”
Head to head
Put two careers on the same scale and see where the argument actually sits.
Ours alone
Recognitions handed out by this desk, on criteria no awards body uses.
Career Achievement
Awarded
31 years of relevant work — not merely a long career, but a long career of choices.
Modern Classic Performer
Awarded
Defining performances delivered inside the last twenty-five years, in films already being taught rather than merely remembered.
Comedy Legend
Awarded
16 catalogue titles in comedy, each one a reference point for the films that followed.
Our desk
Best ending, best opening, best twist and the rest — categories we apply to everyone we cover.
Best ending
Apollo 11 : Retour vers la lune
as Narrator
The last five minutes reorganise everything before them, and hold up when you already know what's coming.
Best opening
The Da Vinci Code
as Flight Controller
A first sequence that states the rules of the film without explaining a single one of them.
Most emotional
The Most Precious of Cargoes
as Man with the Broken Face (voice)
The film where the technique steps aside and lets the feeling arrive undefended.
Best twist
Maigret and the Dead Lover
as Commissaire Jules Maigret
A reversal earned by information the film gave you and trusted you to misread.
Best visual achievement
Apollo 11 : Retour vers la lune
as Narrator
Images that would survive with the sound switched off.
Best action sequence
5H48, Place des Martyrs
as Marc Vadé
Geography, stakes and consequence held in the same frame — spectacle you can follow.
Best dialogue
The Most Precious of Cargoes
as Man with the Broken Face (voice)
Lines written to be spoken, staged so the pauses do half the work.
Most underrated film
French Tech
as Alexandre Duveteux
The public vote sits below ours on this one, and the direction is the reason for the gap.
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Have your say
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Reference
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