The Limited Times

Now you can see non-English news...

"I needed to protect my kids": Omar Sy explains why he left France

2022-12-23T10:06:28.160Z


The Caesarized actor moved to Los Angeles with his family ten years ago. In the columns of Psychologies magazine, on newsstands since December 21, the star of Intouchables (2011) confided in his childhood, his relationship to notoriety and what he wants for his own children.


In the space of a few years, he went from "Omar and Fred" to "Omar Sy", one of the favorite personalities of the French.

The turning point began in 2011, when he was the headliner of one of the greatest successes of French cinema:

Intouchables

.

The film counts 17 million spectators, and his face becomes known to all.

The reasons for such a meteoric rise?

“It happened because people decided it.

Me, I did nothing for that”, he declares humbly in the January 2023 issue of

Psychologies

magazine.

In video, Ludivine Sagnier: "With Omar, memories are often linked to laughter"

“We just wanted to spend a year in the sun”

“Love”, he receives a lot from the French.

“Love must always be taken,” he acknowledges in the article.

But after this national success, his notoriety became heavy.

“I needed to protect my kids”, recognizes Omar Sy in the columns of the monthly.

But the decision to move to the American West Coast was not made overnight.

“We just wanted to spend a year in the sun, have a good time, and then come back.

Except that it worked much better than we imagined.

There were job opportunities, we felt good there, we found a form of relief from what we had just experienced in France.

Over there, notoriety is sweeter.”

So Omar, his wife Hélène, and their four children (Selly, 21, Sabah, 18, Tidiane, 16, Alhadji, 13), have settled in the City of Angels.

Amani-Nour, the youngest, joined the Sy clan in 2017.

"Over there, notoriety is sweeter"

Omar Sy

Between emancipation and belonging to the clan

On the poster of

Tirailleurs

(in theaters on January 4, 2023), Omar Sy, whose father is of Senegalese origin and Mauritanian mother, returned to his childhood and his relationship with his family.

“At home, we mostly spoke Fulani.

[...] [My parents] wanted us to have this culture, this history in us.

The story of the Sy, of the Sy clan”.

Nevertheless, the actor from Trappes has always sought to chart his own path, and to free himself from his family history.

Journey that he continues today in the lands of the American dream.

“When you are binational, you are, in fact, everywhere at home.

But that is only possible if we emancipate ourselves from its history.

If we allow ourselves not to take everything from our inheritance.

I have a collective consciousness.

But I like being able to escape from it.

“I left the door open to the extraordinary, I do the same with my children.

»

Omar Sy

Occasionally, he speaks Peul, his “intimate language”, in certain films that he co-produces in Senegal.

Tirailleurs

is also a feature film that honors the hundreds of thousands of Africans who fought during the First World War.

Omar Sy presented it in preview in Dakar, on December 21st.

Their children

However, he specifies: being a black actor does not make his smallest actions a political act.

“We saw politics in everything I did.

I refuse to be put in a box.

Challenge succeeded in view of his extraordinary trajectory, both off-screen and on-screen.

“We saw politics in everything I did.

Me, I refuse to be put in a box”

Omar Sy

"I left the door open to the extraordinary, I do the same with my children," he told the monthly.

“I have a very different relationship with each of the five.

But to everyone, I want to pass on this ''we'', which I nevertheless fled: the Fulani, the Sy, the clan.

And to add: “Alone we do not do much.

The collective allows things bigger than us”.

For the Sy children, it will be a question, as for their father, of finding their individual path while being aware of the history of their ancestors.

Lady Diana: the broken fate of an icon

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST

Source: lefigaro

All life articles on 2022-12-23

You may like

News/Politics 2024-02-28T06:15:39.290Z

Trends 24h

Latest

© Communities 2019 - Privacy

The information on this site is from external sources that are not under our control.
The inclusion of any links does not necessarily imply a recommendation or endorse the views expressed within them.