Robert Pirès makes cinema debut at 52: "It's a real profession"

Robert Pirès has traded his boots for film sets. More than a decade after retiring, the former winger and 1998 World Cup champion makes his cinema debut in Melpomène, released September 30, where he plays the cousin of director Charlotte Dauphin alongside Andie MacDowell.

It all started with a chance encounter. The acting coach of the lead actress lives in the same building as Pirès in Paris. “She told me that Charlotte was looking for new faces for her next film,” he recalls. “She asked if I was interested. I told her I’d think about it, because it’s not my profession.”

The former Arsenal player ultimately accepted, taking the challenge very seriously. He attended coaching sessions to learn how to breathe, occupy space, and be attentive to the other actors’ performances. “It’s a real profession, and I don’t have the basics,” he admits. “Finding the right intonation, speaking at the right moment — it wasn’t obvious.”

The pressure he felt in front of the camera surprised him, given that he had played in Champions League and World Cup finals. “When you make a mistake in football, a teammate can usually fix it. In cinema, if you mess up, everyone starts over. So I didn’t want to fail.”

Pirès nevertheless found connections between the two disciplines. “We each act in our own way,” he says. “Provoking, diving at the right moment when there was no foul — I knew how to do that.” A transparent allusion to his diving skills on the pitch, which earned him some ribbing from his film crew: “They teased me, telling me to strengthen my acting game. They asked if I’d strengthened my speech” — a direct reference to the iconic sequence from the documentary Les yeux dans les Bleus, where Aimé Jacquet had used the same phrase with him.

This film adventure came during a busy week for Pirès: he had just organized his testimonial match at Metz, where Thierry Henry, Samuel Eto’o, Franck Ribéry, Marcel Desailly, and Patrick Vieira attended, under the technical direction of Aimé Jacquet and Arsène Wenger.