Two actors for one life: Dhont's Coward splits Cannes' Best Actor prize

The same kitchen. The same set. Two different actors.

The opening twenty minutes of “Coward” present a single character, Leo, twice. One actor plays him in his twenties. The other, in the very same kitchen, plays him in his late forties, returning to that house twenty-five years later.

This is the central dramaturgical move by Lukas Dhont, the Belgian director who at thirty-one already won the Cannes Grand Prix for “Close” four years ago. He now returns with a film that is not only about masculinity, nor about childhood, but about the moment a man admits he did not become the person he was meant to be.

The 79th edition’s jury, chaired by Park Chan-wook, decided to split the Best Actor award equally between Valentin Campagne and Emmanuel Macchia, who in the film share the same Leo.

The premiere took place in the Grand Theatre Lumiere on May 19, with a twelve-minute ovation after the closing credits. The production is Belgian-French-Swedish. Distribution rights are already sold for fourteen European territories, including Serbia. The local premiere date has not yet been confirmed, but the autumn release is expected once the festival cycle ends and distributors in Belgrade, Sarajevo and Zagreb settle a coordinated schedule.

What Dhont does with masculinity

Four years ago, “Close” was a film about two boys at a transitional age, when the world around the friendship begins to read it as something it is not, and under that pressure it falls apart.

“Coward” lifts the same theme into the late forties. Leo, now an architect with a small office in Bruges, is called back to the family house because of his father’s illness. The return means facing:

• the friend from his youth, who never left the small town
• the high-school girlfriend, who has since become a doctor
• the father, who can no longer speak
• and himself, twenty-five years later

Dhont films that return not as melodrama but as a series of small scenes in which a man realises how much of his current unhappiness is a well-organised escape from something he never knew how to say but should have.

Two actors, one life

The casting choice is probably the boldest decision in the film. Valentin Campagne, the young French actor who has in recent years worked with Mia Hansen-Love and Bruno Dumont, plays Leo in his twenties, when everything still pointed forward. Emmanuel Macchia, the seasoned Belgian actor known to audiences from the Dardenne brothers’ films, plays the same man in his late forties.

Dhont said in several interviews that he did not want to use makeup or digital techniques for ageing. The film is about time, not about a face. He thought of the two actors as a pair who had to share the same inner architecture, a demand visible in how they prepared for the part.

The shared prize as a jury gesture

The jury’s decision to split the prize between two actors was not accidental. Park Chan-wook said at the post-ceremony press conference that the jury found Campagne and Macchia so bound to one another within the film that giving the prize to one would have been unfair to the other.

In doing so, the jury endorsed Dhont’s premise that the acting role in “Coward” is not an individual performance but a shared one. A similar decision was taken a few years ago when the jury rewarded two actors from Kantemir Balagov’s “Closeness”, but in that case the two were brothers. Here the prize covers the same man, which is the more demanding move dramaturgically.

The same evening, the Best Actress award went ex aequo to Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto for “All of a Sudden” by Ryusuke Hamaguchi. The jury this year produced a symmetrical acting gesture. Criticism has not been absent, particularly in the British film press, which has warned that there are too many ex aequo decisions and that they dilute the weight of individual recognition.

Dhont, for his part, said at the conference that this jury gesture matched the spirit of the film exactly.

Where “Coward” sits in Dhont’s trajectory

Lukas Dhont has made three feature films in the last eight years, which counts as a moderate pace for European auteur cinema:

• “Girl” (2018), about a transgender ballet student, won the Camera d’Or at Cannes
• “Close” (2022), about two boys, took the Grand Prix
• “Coward” (2026), his first film with an adult man as the central figure

His directorial poetic has thus moved gradually from adolescence into adulthood. For a filmmaker who is only 35, this means a series of films tracking the age of his own protagonists.

Belgian critics, whom Novi Sad audiences had a chance to follow at BITEF three years ago when Dhont was a guest director, suggest that “Coward” is his most mature work but perhaps his least emotionally direct. The same question always opens around directors who grow up: is maturity the same as emotional precision, or are they two different directions?

Can an acting prize really be a gift to two performers?

The question that will run through the film magazines in the coming weeks is whether such a decision, however controversial, has any lasting value.

In the case of “Coward”, it is dramaturgically justified. The film genuinely argues that an acting role can be shared. Dhont’s gesture, endorsed by the jury, is one of the rare festival moments where the recognition follows the internal logic of the film rather than the traditional individual metric.

Whether that diminishes the acting canon or expands it is a separate debate.

What do you think: do ex aequo acting prizes weaken the significance of individual recognition, or open a new space for valuing shared performance?