The 33-year-old actor, seen in particular in “Youssef Salem is successful”, “Family Business” and “Detox”, is currently filming, particularly in funny roles. What he himself is. Meeting with the Villeurbannais, who will soon appear alongside Virginie Efira in “Nothing to Lose”, presented at the Cannes Film Festival.
Don’t look for him on the Croisette, he isn’t there. And for good reason. Oussama Kheddam is currently filming. But you’ll see it in the movie Nothing to lose by Delphine Deloget which is presented in the official selection in the category “Un certain regard” at the Cannes Film Festival on May 25. He plays Farid, a friend of Sylvie, played by Virginie Efira, whose child is placed in a home following a domestic accident. This character is “one of the only ones who can calm her down”.
Osama Kheddam? You may have seen it in the series Family Business, where he plays a former thug turned chocolatier. Or in Miskina, the poor in the role of Bilal or Detox, where he plays a nice grocer. Or even at the cinema, where he has, among other things, been part of the cast of Youssef Salem is successful by Baya Kasmi (2022), Retirement home (2020) by Thomas Gilou and Class struggle by Michel Leclerc (2018). Meeting with a young artist whose career, to say the least promising, is just beginning.
Play “in secret” and take courses “on the sly”
Oussama first drew his roots from Mostaganem, Algeria, where he was born on January 23, 1990. He and his family left this Mediterranean port city a year later to settle in France, in Lyon (Rhône). . His parents run a grocery store in the 6th arrondissement. They are then “the only reubeu in the neighborhood” but the business is closing due to work. When Oussama was 6 years old, the family moved to an HLM in the Lyon suburbs, in Villeurbanne, in the Tonkin district. The now 33-year-old actor says to himself “super happy” to have grown up there, with his father, a music and French teacher in Algeria and become a forklift operator then a school animator in France, with his mother, a literary Arabic teacher, and with his two brothers and his sister. “I made my ranges of life in this district, multicultural, with this mutual aid, this permanent love and these dishes which travel between the floors”, remembers the youngest of the siblings.
At 14, Osama, very observant in life, wanted to become a comedian, not yet an actor: “because I didn’t even know the acting business. When I was watching movies, for me, I was watching the real people in their lives”. Apart from his father, oriental pianist “crazy”, his family is not in the show business. In his childhood, he liked to learn sketches by heart in Arabic or French and to recite them to his aunt. “I have always loved telling stories”, he testifies. From 2008 to 2012, he then began a café theater and improvisation course at the MJC in Villeurbanne provided by Delphine Delepaut. This is where he starts to get on stage “hidden from everyone”, he said. “I didn’t tell my family or my friends. I left Villeurbanne and went to Lyon to go on stage and do sketches at L’Accessoire, at the Gerson space, where Laurent Gerra and Florence Foresti started…” At 16, he was contacted to play in a TV movie for France 3. “On the set, I fell in love with this job and I wanted to make it my life.” This experience then forces him to confess his passion to his family, who were not surprised. “I’ve always been the good life of the family, making jokes all the time. When I’m at home you can feel it. When I’m not there, it’s calm.”
A certain Philippe also gives him classical theater lessons. “on the fly”. His attraction to acting is obvious. “I always had this thing that appealed to me. I didn’t know what it was because no one was talking to me about art, acting, theater, all that stuff. I just knew I had something in me.” After the baccalaureate, Oussama begins an information-communication license, without going to the end. “I had my mind elsewhere”, he repeats twice. At the same time, he is an animator with young people aged 9 to 18. “It’s my second passion”he says, insisting on showing us his “kids” in picture. The actor turns out to be a little emotional to recount all his memories because he “don’t talk about it often”. Then, in 2013, he left his hometown to follow Hélène Zidi-Chéruy’s Actor’s Laboratory in Paris for two years. Out of school, he goes to castings until he is 23 years old. “I said to myself: at some point, plan B must become plan A. I must not regret my life, I must really try it’ “.
The first seals
The road therefore seemed all mapped out but not straight for the Villeurbanais. “I’m not starting from zero, I’m starting from less”, affirms the one who has chained many food jobs at the factory, in fast food, delivery, selling cans on the market… If he does not seek to victimize himself, during his first three years in Paris, he ten years ago, Osama experienced great precariousness. For five months, he broke his back at night unloading trucks and putting clothes on the shelves, then he went to class during the day, without having slept. After school, Osama manages to get to work fairly quickly. “When you hit your first pills, you put brand in your fridge. When you have your first iced Snickers in the freezer, you’re happy.” It is from grand bazaar by Baya Kasmi, broadcast in 2019 on M6, that he stops odd jobs and can live from his job. Today, he works well, passing less and less castings but rather tests, thus meeting the directors directly.
“Just seeing his name on an agent’s trombinoscope was my dream when I was a kid”, reports the comedian, humble and grateful. A pride vis-à-vis his family too. “My father has 12 brothers and sisters. We are the first generation to have come to live in France and to see our name like that at the end of a credits, it is an incredible emotion. Where I had even more big emotion it’s the first time I saw my name at the beginning of a film. So that’s something else again. That it’s written in big, it’s a pretty crazy feeling.
Jokes, jokes and puns
“Me, as long as we work together, I want there to be jokes, I want there to be jerks, I want puns.” By his own admission, this line of Youssef’s character in season 1 of Family business by Igor Gotesman defines it well. Very spontaneously, he chained jokes throughout the interview. “My mother always told me (he speaks in Arabic before translating): ‘everything we can bring by shouting we can bring it gently.'” Hence the desire of the son to seek “a beautiful spirit” in things. Which undoubtedly earned him loyalty and friendships forged over the course of the filming. For example, he shot no less than three films with Alexandre Castagnetti, co-creator with Clément Marchand of La Chanson du dimanche from 2007 to 2012 and one of the first to trust him. Recently, he made him play a teacher in The school is ours (2022). “To shoot with Alexandre Castagnetti is benevolence, love, humor, it’s a sun on the set”believes Osama, who even goes so far as to affirm: “I will tour with him until the end”.
If we very often think of him for comedies, the actor recognizes: “I have an easier time in comedy but I also love doing drama.” In HippocratesOsama, yet a hypochondriac in real life, plays a nurse. “On the set, we talk about transplantation, about this, about that, but on the set there is an incredible atmosphere. But between the action and the cleaver, it’s not joking, it’s very serious.”
Make the invisible visible
Her favorite roles? “I like to talk about people we don’t talk about, like tech teachers [dans L’école est à nous].” He will also soon play a garbage collector in an auteur film by Alain Raoust. “This kind of role is exceptional. I love to talk about the invisible. I find that there are a lot of heroes in life that we don’t talk about, that need to be brought to light.”
Light is precisely not what the actor is looking for. “I don’t care about being a star. I just want to tell things.” His secondary roles appeal to him, even becoming attached to his characters. “In Hippocratesit’s not a big role but this Rachid, this little nurse, I love him, because I tell myself a whole background about his life where I tell myself that he is very serious in his work, he has the I seem to have a very difficult life – all these people, we have to talk about them.”
At the time of our meeting, the actor is juggling between two shoots: that of season 3 ofHippocrates and that of a series for Disney+, Children are kings, where he played one of the leading roles alongside Géraldine Nakache and Doria Tillier. His schedule is full until 2024. Season 2 of Sophie Cross, in which he plays a policeman, should also soon be broadcast on France 3. The actor will even go back on stage in September 2024 with Caroline Langlade in a staging by Aline Gaillot at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre. And why not a place in LOL: Who laughs, comes out for this fervent defender of OL? “I think I would be a dangerous element in attack but very poor in defense.”