Anamaria Vartolomei

Watch what Anamaria Vartolomei does when she has no lines. In The Count of Monte Cristo (2024) she is Haydée, one of the two young companions the Count brings to Paris, and while Pierre Niney drops his shoulders and stops blinking and Jérôme Rebotier's brass announces him for the fourth time, she stands a little apart and watches the company. She is not waiting for her cue. She has her own reasons to be in that house, and she plays every scene as though she knew them before we did. It is a small part and she makes it a person.

She has been doing this since she was twelve. Her first film was My Little Princess (2011), opposite Isabelle Huppert, and the decade that followed was child and supporting parts. The turn was Happening (2021), for Audrey Diwan, the lead that made her name: a young woman in trouble with her own body, and the performance critics still describe when they describe her, for its quiet determination and its steadiness in scenes that ask a great deal of the body. She has said: "I was sort of reborn for Happening as an actress." What came after, by her own account, was mostly offers of more of the same, and she went looking for other kinds of work.

Other kinds of work has meant big films, and big films have meant small parts. In Mickey 17 (2025), for Bong Joon-ho, her first film in English, she is Kai Katz, and the film is so full of Robert Pattinson twice and Mark Ruffalo shouting that she barely registers; we did not single her out and nor, honestly, did the film. Antonin Baudry's De Gaulle: Liberté (2026) gives her Livia, a resistance courier, and here she does the most with the least: a woman who has learned to be forgettable, watching a room. In 159 minutes of national anthem at full volume, hers was the performance we kept thinking about on the way home, and it worked because nobody else on screen was supposed to notice her. That is a hard thing to play well.

Between the big ones she has kept up the other kind of film. Being Maria (2024), in which she plays Maria Schneider, is a lead we have not reviewed. The pattern is now plain: a drama that asks everything of her, then a large production that asks for three scenes and a good stillness. She has said she chooses women who feed her and that her films are her politics, and the parts she takes, ambitious and troubled young women with something to decide, bear that out.

The caveat is that three good small parts are three small parts. The Count, the Général and the clones have all been glad of her and none has handed her the middle of the frame. Someone should. On the evidence of a courier watching a room, she would know what to do with it.