In unwavering commitment to his role in László Nemes’ harrowing competition title Moulin, up-and-comer Félix Lefebvre slept in the grizzly, mattress-less cell he and co-star Gilles Lellouche were shooting in — for a good few nights.

“There was bats. I didn’t have any idea what time it was. And I felt like those guys during the Second World War, [who] actually went through it and were having such a hard time,” the young French star tells The Hollywood Reporter. “I just wanted to be the best version of me, as an actor.”

To provide some much-needed context, the Hungarian filmmaker returns to the Croisette — where he picked up the Grand Prix in 2015 for Son of Saul, the film that would go on to claim him an Oscar — with the real-life story of French resistance hero Jean Moulin (played by Lellouche). It follows Moulin’s arrest in June 1943 as he attempted to reunify the forces of the Secret Army, and wound up tortured by the sinister Klaus Barbie, head of the Gestapo (Lars Eidinger).

To those unfamiliar with French World War II history, the figure might not even ring any bells. This was not the case for Lefebvre, who grew up studying Moulin. “It’s in our history class program. We hear everything about him — he’s this heroic figure, a leader of the resistance in France during the Second World War. It’s one of the things that you learn at school that you actually remember,” the 26-year-old continues, “because you hear that this guy went through the worst torture and didn’t say a word. So as a kid, you hear that, and you start thinking, ‘Well, if I went through a lot of pain, would I be brave?’ I have a very vivid memory of [learning about] this man.”

When Lefebvre — whose biggest credit to date, Summer of 85, landed him a César Award nomination for most promising actor — caught wind of Nemes’ project, he went all in. “He was watching the audition through a screen,” Lefebvre remembers. “It was this distance between him and I, and it was kind of intimidating. But then I did the first take and went really emotional … He just stood up and went closer to me and said, ‘OK, that was good. But that was too much. I think it can be great if you go more interior.’”

The more they riffed, the more impressed Nemes was. Lefebvre secured the part of Martin, Moulin’s cellmate once captured by the Nazis. “[What is] very interesting about my character is that Jean Moulin, through all the movie, is paranoid with everybody that he meets. He feels like he cannot trust anybody,” the actor explains. “Everybody around him could betray him and put the French’s future in danger. So when he meets me, we are doing these scenes in the prison that kind of feels like a game of poker — where one is trying to understand if the other one is bluffing, working for the enemy, or if he’s on your side.”

As aforementioned, Lefebvre took this game of mental poker between Martin and Jean extremely seriously. He camped out on the Budapest set — re-created to exactly match the cell the pair would have faced off in — to lose himself in Martin’s headspace, and relished being treated by acclaimed star Lellouche as a peer, not a pupil. “I always love when the great and big actors just start seeing you as a colleague,” he says. “We were really, really trying to create something together, and trying to find some truth in it together.”

It’s actually the star’s third Cannes-bound movie, though one of them, Summer of 85, was released during the pandemic, so he never made it to the Palais. In 2021, Lefebvre came with the out-of-competition Supreme, and just three years ago, premiered Delphine Deloget’s Nothing to Lose in Un Certain Regard. But Moulin, his first competition title, is particularly special: “It’s my first time [doing] the whole red carpet experience for the movie, a few thousand people watching the movie, and I’m going to discover the movie there, too.” (He has not yet seen the finished film.) “It’s going to be, I think, a very emotional moment.”

It is just one highlight from an extremely busy 2026 for Lefebvre, who has Léopold Kraus’ Microstar premiering in June and, later in the year, another movie called The Last Patient. He considers some of his dream collaborators and Paul Thomas Anderson’s name swiftly comes up, but so does Aftersun‘s Charlotte Wells and How to Have Sex director Molly Manning Walker. “Those two,” he says with a laugh about Wells and Walker, “would be the dream directors [that] I feel like I could say, ‘Hey, nice to meet you,’ at Cannes — and they would answer me!”

Before he gets to mingling with European cinema’s hottest auteurs, he must first receive his roses for Moulin. It’s no less than he deserves after that particularly method cell stay: “After a few nights, I slept so bad that I was like, ‘OK, I also now need to sleep to be able to do my job correctly.’ ” 

EXCLUSIVE: Archstone Entertainment is launching world sales in Cannes on Oscar nominee Tim Roth (Pulp Fiction) and BAFTA and Cannes Best Actor winner Timothy Spall (Mr. Turner) crime-thriller Murdering Michael Malloy, which is inspired by real events.

From director Raymond De Felitta (City Island), the film is aiming to shoot third quarter 2026.

Based on a true story, Roth “will play struggling bar owner Tony Marino, who along with his partner, Bastogne, takes out a life-insurance policy on neighborhood drunk Michael Malloy (Spall). The pair then attempt to kill Malloy for the payout—only to discover Malloy is seemingly impossible to kill. As Marino’s increasingly desperate schemes continue to fail, the two men form an unexpected bond, building toward a haunting final act of sacrifice against the backdrop of Depression-era New York”.

De Felitta co-wrote the screenplay with David Zellerford. The film is produced by Stephen Endelman, who is also composing; Dan Grodnik; Louise Chater, and Jeff Wallner of Harbor Lights Entertainment and Icarus Entertainment Fund, with casting by Shakyra Dowling.

Raymond De Felitta was Academy Award–nominated for short Bronx Cheers and his feature debut Café Society premiered in Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight. His subsequent features Two Family House and City Island earned Audience Awards at Sundance and Tribeca, respectively. De Felitta’s later work includes the crime drama Rob the Mob and the ABC miniseries Madoff, which earned him a Directors Guild of America nomination.

De Felitta stated: “I’ve long been passionate about making Murdering Michael Malloy and now, twenty-five years after writing the screenplay, I have the perfect two actors to portray the lead roles. Tim Roth and Timothy Spall are truly ‘actors actors’ and I know that both will bring tremendous force, honesty and humor to a crime story that is not only a dark comedy but also morality tale about two equally bankrupted souls who find redemption in each other. In many ways, it’s a twisted story and I can’t think of two more wonderfully twisted actors I’d rather work with.”

Legal representation is provided by James Pacitti and Lee & Thompson, with Archstone Entertainment handling worldwide sales.

Michael Slifkin of Archstone added: “We are incredibly excited to be involved with Murdering Michael Malloy. The film brings together an extraordinary cast, visionary filmmakers, and a truly unique story that is both wildly entertaining and emotionally unexpected.”

Roth is represented by CAA and Markham, Froggatt and Irwin. Spall is represented by Markham, Froggatt and Irwin, and managed by Berwick & Kovacik.

Oscar nominated for Hotel Rwanda, Sophie Okonedo comes to Directors’ Fortnight with Clarissa, an adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway directed by Nigerian siblings Arie and Chuko Esiri. Okonedo stars as the title character — Clarissa is the heroine’s Christian name — and the story follows a day in the life of this society woman as she plans a dinner party. The kicker here is that the Esiri brothers have shifted Woolf’s very British period tale to Lagos, with key sections in a contemporary setting. Here, Okonedo reveals how she broke down in tears when she heard that the film had been accepted.

DEADLINE: You’re headed to Cannes!

SOPHIE OKONEDO: I feel like I just finished making it, and, yeah, so that’s bonkers. Me and Chuko and Arie, we were just like… (She draws a breath.) I was in tears. I’ve never been to Cannes.

DEADLINE: You’ve never been?

OKONEDO: I’ve never, ever been — and to be going with this film! I said, “If nothing else happens, this is more than we could ever wanted to happen to this film.” It was so hard to get off the ground. And tricky to get a film made in Nigeria. Obviously, they’ve got the huge Nollywood industry. But it’s a different type of film to that, and to get a film made on 35mm, and shot with nearly all Nigerian crew, is just extraordinary. There were so many instances of, ‘it nearly didn’t happen,’ right up until the wire, really.

DEADLINE: How long did it take to put the film together?

OKONEDO: My first conversation with Arie and Chuko was around the time of the [pandemic] lockdown. They’d got in touch with my agent in America and they’d sent a link to their first film, Eyimofe (This Is My Desire) [2020]. I watched that and said to myself: “Oh, that’s great. I’m going to definitely meet.”

So they came up with a few ideas they told me about, and then they mentioned doing a re-imagining of Mrs. Dalloway, that they were going to do in Lagos. And I was like, “I’m in.” 

 I didn’t hear from them for about a year and a half, and then they sent a script through. I just thought, ‘This is fantastic’. I said, “Yes, I’ll definitely do it.” There was no money. After that, I just sort of kept in touch. Then Theresa Park (Bones and All, Roar) came on as a producer, and they just went off and raised the money. 

I was in touch with Chuko. He came down to visit me in Sussex, and then he came to the theater to see me perform in Medea [at Soho Place theater in early 2023]. They’re in London quite a lot.

DEADLINE: It’s an exciting time for filmmakers of Nigerian heritage to be headed to Cannes, after My Father’s Shadow was there.

OKONEDO: I love that film. I met Akinola [Davis]. I thought he was amazing as well. I met him for lunch and he was such an interesting guy.

DEADLINE: Are the Esiris young guys as well?

OKONEDO: They’re around the same generation as Akinola. Not young young.

DEADLINE: What was the process like?

OKONEDO: Each step of the way, when they came through with the script, I thought, well, this is amazing. Just to get this far, this is great. And then when we completed it, I thought, I feel like I’ve massively achieved something already. And then to get [into Cannes]… It’s so meaningful for us. I was thinking that it’d be a long haul.

 I mean, we still had to get all the fine stuff together for Cannes. They watched quite a rough version, but they wanted it. And it has happened really fast. I was only back there doing a few extra scenes just recently… Little bits and pieces, because we were so limited on time and trying to film on film — it’s not like digital, where you can just jump around all the time. You have to really set things up, because you can’t afford on such a low budget to waste film. 

DEADLINE: What made them so bold as to shoot it on film? 

OKONEDO: [Laughs.] They are bold. They’re very bold. They’re not like me. I’m full of working-class insecurities, and they’re not really like that. They believe in themselves, and they are very singular with their kind of vision. 

DEADLINE: What did the novel Mrs. Dalloway mean to you when you first read it?

OKONEDO: I didn’t get it at all, the book. I read it when I was young. I had no idea what the hell it was going on about. Then I read it at my age now and it knocked my socks off.

DEADLINE: Because you’ve been living your life, haven’t you?

OKONEDO: Virginia Woolf… The writing in that book is so incredible. I mean, just the way she writes about stepping off the pavement and onto the road. Half a lifetime she describes in that moment — her feelings and thoughts, her hopes and fears. And I’m at the age where I’m looking back on my life and, obviously, looking forward, looking back. Was that the right way? Was that the right thing? And that’s what so much of the book is.

[In the book] Mrs. Dalloway does a walk through London, it all takes place over 24 hours. I followed the walk described in the book, two days before I went to Lagos, I thought, I’ll just do the London walk of Mrs. Dalloway, thinking that the wonder I have about London, I could infuse that when I got to Lagos. But it wasn’t hard, because in Lagos there was just too much to watch.

DEADLINE: There’s certainly a heck of a lot going on in Lagos.

OKONEDO: It is a really chaotic place. I thought, how are we ever going to make a film here? But there’s a kind of exuberance and an energy there. I went to do a bit of research before filming because I hadn’t been there for over 20 years. I stayed with Chuko and Arie and their mum. In fact, I stayed with their mum the whole time of filming because she’s a wonderful woman, and I just wanted to absorb. I wasn’t brought up in Nigeria. I don’t know my Nigerian family. I didn’t grow up with them. I didn’t grow up in that life.

DEADLINE: Does your Mrs. Dalloway have a Nigerian accent?

OKONEDO: Oh, no. This is the thing. So, sometimes things in the script are set now in Lagos, and we’re also looking back 20 or 25 years ago. And also the part of Lagos where Chuko and Arie live, and where parts of the bit that my story is set, is in a place called Victoria Island, which is very nice.

I was reading the script thinking, is this Lagos — all these very Western restaurants? I just didn’t recognize it. But they pointed out that this is how the younger generation are now.

When I got there, I said, “Well, shall I do some work [on my accent]. How do you want me to sound?” They said, “Oh no, just sound like a posh version of you.” And then they said, “Well, look, how do we sound?” They went to public schools in England, and so they just sound like public school boys, basically. One of the actors said, “Well, is a Western audience going to understand that there’s people like this in Lagos?” And Chuko and Arie went, “We don’t care. This is what we’re doing.”

DEADLINE: Precisely!

OKONEDO: I just love them for that. They introduced me to one of their godmothers, who they said was very like Clarissa, and she was incredibly grand. So I actually had to sort of beef it up a little bit. I was a bit posher than normal.

But then, obviously, there are other characters in Mrs. Dalloway. There’s the soldier, Septimus [Warren Smith, a young shell-shocked infantryman featured in a parallel story], and, of course, they speak in a local dialect. 

DEADLINE: This would be the Nigerian actor Fortune Nwafor?

OKONEDO: He is wonderful, this young lad, I mean, he’s something else. They had lots of Nigerian actors in it. David Oyelowo who plays Peter, the love of Clarissa’s life. [Ted Lasso star Toheeb Jimoh, also Nigerian, is the younger Peter].

DEADLINE: I’m fascinated by your remark about how Lagos society women are quite grand. My own Nigerian aunts, when I was growing up, were incredibly grand, and I used to hide from them.

OKONEDO: Frightening! Oh, the attitude, I’ve already missed it. I did love it there, even in the chaos and the frustrations of trying to just get from A to B because of the traffic. 

There are a lot of problems, which I’m not clever enough to go into, so I can only grab what I can, which is the energy. And also the loudness of people, I’ve always kind of restrained myself here. But when I’m there, if I find something funny, I can just throw my head back, roll on the floor, kick my legs in the air and have a good old laugh — and nobody looks.

 Obviously, there’s a part of me that’s totally British, but there’s also a part of me that’s so Nigerian, and because I haven’t spent time there, I didn’t understand that part until I went back.

And this project has been so meaningful to me on a personal level that anything that happens with it afterwards is just extra.

DEADLINE: The whole idea that this very traditonally British, classic piece of literature has now been transposed to a former British Commonwealth country — it’s as if some aspects of culture are attempting to shake off the British straitjacket.

OKONEDO: You know, it really does feel like that. And also, when I was there… You just get such a kind of European or American-centric view [in the West], but when I was there you realize, f*ck, there’s this whole other world where stuff is happening all the time.

DEADLINE: And also there’s this whole other audience.

OKONEDO: There is another gaze. Of course, there aren’t loads and loads of cinemas there, but people are watching things… maybe not in the way you want them to watch things, but people are still watching stuff.

I came away thinking, maybe I just should go and do the Nollywood format and try and create something like that but using the stories that I want to tell. It’d be really great if I could just meet those millions of people and tell the kind of stories that I’m drawn to, a very sort of inclusive format. I just thought, I’ve been so concentrated on ‘the Western gaze’ and perhaps that’s no longer where it’s at.