Omar Sy

Omar Sy was born to a Senegalese father and Mauritanian mother on January 20, 1978, the fourth of eight children, and grew up in a largely immigrant banlieue outside Paris. He told NPR back in 2011 when he was publicizing the film he is best known for so far, The Intouchables: “I feel completely French, but it’s true that as the son of immigrants I struggled with my identity, especially in my teenage years. But I’ve been able to take aspects of both French and African culture and I’m all the richer for it, even if it does mean I have a little more baggage than most people.”

The Intouchables became France’s second highest-grossing film and won Sy a César for Best Actor, the first Black actor to win one. For the kid who started out doing impersonations on a radio comedy show right after high school, his career has progressed in leaps and bounds. Audiences have since seen him in X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014), Jurassic World (2015), Inferno (2016), Transformers: The Last Knight (2017), and the Netflix drama Lupin (2021) for which he just received his first Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor in a Drama series.