It was never Suzy Bemba’s plan to become a professional actress. This year’s European Shooting Star from France had dabbled in performance — “10 years of ballet, maybe six years of singing classes,” she recalls. After a knee injury made it impossible to keep dancing, she switched to acting as “a new way of expression” and started trying out for open auditions, driving with her mother the two and half hours into Paris from their home in the French countryside. Her mother sent out inquiries to French talent agencies, and one agreed to sign Bemba after she graduated high school.
But when Bemba graduated, acting was the last thing on her mind. “I wanted to go to med school, that was always the dream, so when I graduated, that’s what I did,” she says. “I kind of forgot about the idea of acting.”
It was only after her freshman year when she just missed the cut to qualify for second-year studies and knew she would have to repeat, that Bemba decided to take a break. “It was April of 2019, and I thought, ‘Maybe I could get a nice summer job and try acting?’”
That Parisian agency was still keen on her. And, on her first audition, she landed the role, starring in Kandisha, a teen horror movie inspired by ancient Moroccan legend about a vengeful demon. “We shot in Belgium over the summer, for two months, my first time on a movie set,” she recalls. “Then in the fall, I went back to med school.”
But the roles kept coming. Bemba tapped into her dance background to play Flora, a striving young ballerina in French series L’Opéra, alongside Ariane Labed (The Lobster, The Souvenir). Last year, she had a supporting role in Anthony Chen’s Sundance drama Drift starring Cynthia Erivo; played the lead, alongside Esther Gohourou (Cuties), in Catherine Corsini’s Cannes competition title Homecoming; and gave a scene-stealing performance as Toinette, the French prostitute who introduces Emma Stone’s character Bella to socialism, in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Oscar-nominated Poor Things.
She did all this while still sticking to Plan A. “My parents told me I needed to finish med school, so I’ve been doing acting and studying at the same time,” says Bemba. “I don’t know if my mom is convinced acting is a real job.”
She continues to balance the two worlds. On Jan. 15, Bemba attended the Cesar Revelations dinner for up-and-coming French talent and, a day later, was sitting for her final exams in Marseilles. “It’s a lot, but in some ways, it takes the pressure off, because I’m not working [as an actor], I’m busy studying. I’m not worried about finding the next job,” she says. “When I spend too much time just acting, I feel like my brain is shrinking, like I’m missing something.”
With less time to devote to screen work, Bemba is incredibly selective in her roles, only saying yes to characters she can fully support, both creatively and politically. “In helping to create images that will stay in people’s brains, I have a huge responsibility,” she says. “And being a Black actress and a Black woman, I have the responsibility to not play characters that perpetuate wrong or harmful stereotypes.” She calls Toinette in Poor Things her “favorite character ever” because “she is a socialist and a feminist and whatever pain she has, she’s never in pain because she is a Black female.”
Bemba’s activism extends to the industry itself. Last year, together with Labed and two other up-and-coming French talents, Daphné Patakia (Benedetta) and Zita Hanrot (The Hookup Plan), she founded the professional support group The Actors Association to fight against harassment and push for better protections on set, including the use of intimacy coordinators, who are still a rarity on French productions.
France is going through its own (belated) #MeToo moment, with high-profile allegations of sexual assault and abuse leveled at industry luminaries including actor Gérard Depardieu and directors Benoît Jacquot and Jacques Doillon. Homecoming was also the focus of a scandal ahead of its Cannes premiere, amid reports of a lack of safeguarding of minors and young actors on set. It was not a case of criminal misdeeds, Bemba says, but more a series of smaller incidents that undermined the actors’ trust.
“It definitely made me realize how important it is to speak up when something is not OK,” she says. “Otherwise it just builds up and can be harmful to the job and to the acting experience.”
Five years on from that “summer job,” acting is becoming something close to a career for Bemba. Following Poor Things, she had roles in French TV series Everything Is Well alongside Virginie Efira and in the French comedy L’esprit Coubertin from director Jérémie Sein. “I am French and I really want to work in France, but I have the feeling that someone like me doesn’t always fit in the imaginations of French screenwriters,” she says. “I’m hoping that will change, but I’m absolutely thrilled to be able to work with English or American directors because working on Poor Things made me realize how different those sets are from France and how great it can be.”
And if that doesn’t work out, there’s always that medical degree to fall back on.
