MS. NINA SEUL

Talented French Actress

French actress, Nina Seul was born on March 5, 1983, near Paris, France. She is the daughter of a German university professor and a French-Italian mother in charge of Cultural Programming of Cannes Palais des Festivals. Nina was raised in Cannes, on the French Riviera, famous for its worldwide well known Film Festival. Very soon she attended movie screenings and theater plays with her parents, both of whom were very passionate about arts and culture.

When did you decide that you wanted to become an actress?

As far as I remember I’ve always wanted to become an actress. I started Theater School when I was 10 and before that I was creating little shows with my brother and my cousin, we would then perform in front of the family. It honestly feels that this career chose me, and not the other way around. All the joy and all the heartache was just inescapable.

Tell me a little about yourself?

I was born in France near Paris, I am the daughter of a German university professor and a French-Italian mother in charge of Cultural Programming of the Cannes Palais des Festivals. I was raised in Cannes, on the French Riviera, famous for its worldwide wellknown Film Festival. Very soon I attended movie screenings and theater plays with my parents, both of whom are very passionate about arts and culture. I’m French, German and Italian and I’ve always been very curious about different cultures.

After high school, I moved to Paris to study literature and theater. This is where I started my career, first on stage and then in TV and films. After 15 years living in Paris, I decided to move to Los Angeles.

What do you like most about acting the most?

Acting is all about passion, it allows me to do something I’m passionate about. It’s a lot of work and sometimes frustration, but it’s also very rewarding. Working on a character can be fascinating and bringing this character to life for a short moment gives me an incredible feeling, it gives you the chance to live different lives and express a very large range of emotions through ‘life situations’ that we usually don’t experience. It’s a work that’s never boring and that gives me the opportunity

to travel around the world and meet interesting and talented people. What drives me with acting is to become the vessel between the written character and the audience. To bring to life a character for an audience is a very powerful feeling.

Can you introduce yourself to our audience?

Hi! I’m Nina Seul. I am a french actress living in Los Angeles. I’ve been working in this industry for more than 15 years, In France, Germany, Ukraine, Morocco and the US. I love new challenges and moving to LA three years ago was a big one! I left my career in Europe behind and gave myself the chance to expand it here in America. I’ve been meeting incredible people here, building a new network and a work family. My next project is going to be an action Thriller, ‘Violent Origami’, I’m very excited about it!

Did you take up any training in acting?

Yes, I did take training in acting, I think it’s very important to work on your skills and perfect them with training. I started my career on the stage in classic plays. When you are on stage you need to know how to use your voice, your breath because the audience needs to hear you and you have to reach everyone. It’s part of the training. You also have to learn how to deliver your lines in some specific ways when you are playing classic authors like Shakespeare or Moliere for example. Acting class is also the best time to explore the different acting techniques and see what works for you. I studied in New York at Stella Adler Conservatory of Acting and in France in conservatories in Paris and Cannes.

When did you start acting? What got you started?

I started to take classes when I was 10 and was in acting programs throughout school. Then I moved to Paris after High School and started my acting career at 20. I was in a theater company and my first role was Miranda in the Tempest by Shakespeare.

Who is your inspiration?

I usually find my inspiration in life, travels, people, movies. Everything I see, everyone I meet can feed my imagination, my inner world and subconscious! I use reality to build my characters. For example when I was nineteen I was a huge fan of the show Alias starring Jennifer Garner and she is the reason why I started Martial Art training, I wanted to be able to perform action roles. I think Meryl Streep is the actress who impresses me the most. She is an electric actress. The entertainment industry and the audience are lucky to have a lot of very good actresses and actors, it would be difficult to name all of them, so just to mention some of them, I really admire the work of Viola Davis, Natalie Portman, Kerry Washington or Scarlett Johansson among other.

2 theater plays). I love cooking and probably would have worked as a chef if I wasn’t an actress. I’m vegetarian for more than 20 years and I love to experiment around food, using family recipes from the south of France (my mother and my grandmother passed me our culinary traditions) and finding inspiration in exotic cuisine like Thai or Indian food. It’s amazing how a simple vegetable can allow you to be creative and fun and how you can work the texture and the taste depending if you use it raw, roasted, sautéed, fried, mashed or baked! Cooking for people I love is a great joy and a way to share and show my love.

You have featured in so many great films, which one was your favorite and why?

I had the chance to live some wonderful adventures with films in different countries and every time I’m on set I feel incredibly lucky and happy to have the chance to act so it’s difficult to pick a favorite. But the experience I had when I shot F63.9 in Ukraine for two months was magical. I played the lead - a single mother and prominent doctor specializing in sexually transmitted diseases who was approached by the Space agency to cure one of their cosmonauts. It was a real challenge because everyone (including fellow actors and the director) were only speaking Ukrainian or Russian and before the shoot I was a bit worried about it but it didn’t end up being a problem at all once the filming started. We shot in Kiev and Crimea, both locations are beautiful and very unique and there is this special spirit that you can feel in some of these old cities. Those memories will live in me forever.

What attracted you to begin a career as an actress?

To be honest, acting wasn’t something I chose. It’s a scary and very uncertain path, you don’t really have control on things and for one role that you book there are probably way more roles that you didn’t book. But it was a career that called me. I was a good student, so when I finished high school I was accepted to a prestigious college in Paris. I decided to do both: college and acting school, but after a few months I realized that all my passion and efforts were in acting and the choice became obvious. As I said earlier, acting is a vocation. I don’t know why it came to me, maybe growing up in a city like Cannes has something to do with it?

How are you feeling now after getting the award?

I got a Best Actress award for the movie Border at the global Film festival Awards and it feels incredibly rewarding and humbling. The role was challenging because it’s a non speaking role and all the emotions have to be transmitted by the face, the body language and the expressions. The movie deals with a strong and very heavy topic, my character Laura is a medical examiner in Arizona who finds and processes dead bodies of illegal border-crossers trapped acting in English which is not my native language requires me to work every day on it. in the desert. So with no words I had to find the right balance between a character who deals with death every day but who also keeps her humanity and empathy.

Tell us about the contemporary scene” Enter Laughing” by Joseph Stein?

Enter Laughing was my first acting in English language actually! It was in New York at the Stella Adler theater. It was interesting for me to discover the writer Joseph Stein and American humor through this comedy. Humor as a genre is a very difficult exercise for an actor. Making an audience laugh is more difficult than making an audience cry. I really enjoyed the exercise and was happy to work on something different (I started my acting career with classic plays).

Tell us a little bit about the Cannes Conservatory of Music that you attended?

I studied piano for more than 14 years and I really enjoyed learning at the Cannes Conservatory of Music. I started my training with classical music and the 2 last years of my training I was experimenting with some jazz basics. Studying in the conservatory environment taught me to have a good work ethic and also how important it is to work on your art and skills every day. I really believe that regularity is the key to success in every field. It helped me as an actress. And especially now that I live and work in the USA,

How and when exactly did you realize you had the passion for acting?

I always knew acting was a very important part of my life. As a child I was inventing little plays and during all my schooling I was in special schools with theater options. In High School one of my majors was theater. But I really realized that I wanted to become an actress when I moved to Paris and I had to choose between the prestigious college I was attending (studying literature and humanities) and my theater class. I realized that I wasn’t able to do both on an intensive level and had to make a choice. I chose acting.

Describe your last experience on stage?

My last experience on stage was in Paris few years ago before moving to Los Angeles. In parallel to my TV career I was also on stage working on different plays. One of the last one was : ‘Le president, sa femme et moi’. We performed at La Grande Comedie in Paris in front of 400 persons every night for few months and it was amazing to feel a different vibe every night. There is something special in live entertainment. You can really feel the audience , it’s challenging and exciting! The few minutes before being on stage I am always talking to myself : ”Nina, why are you doing this to yourself ? See how anxious and stressed you feel? You have the jitters, your heart beats so fast, your stomach hurts! Why are you doing this to yourself ?!” And the minute I am on stage, a completely different feeling appears in my body and in my heart: pleasure, fun, love, well being! I always feel a bit sad when the play ends and the curtain falls, even when I know I will be back on stage the next night.

What was your longest-running role on stage or film?

My longest running role on stage was for the play that I wrote: “Vous n’avez pas de nouveau message” (You don’t have any new voicemail). We performed for more than a year in Paris, Cannes, Rennes and at the Avignon Festival which is the biggest live entertainment arts festival in the world. For a film, it was 2 months in Ukraine for the movie F63.9

What advice can you give others wanting to get into acting?

Well, acting is a difficult path and you have to be aware of it. It appeals to a lot of people but few actors are really earning their living from acting. It’s also a work that comes with a lot of rejection. So, my first advice is to be patient. Don’t give up if it’s really your dream! Don’t take any ‘No’ personally, not winning an audition doesn’t mean you weren’t good, it’s just that you weren’t maybe the best fit for the role. Or maybe the production went another direction or decided to work with someone they already worked with. Anything can happen. You also need to have a very strong work ethic and take care of yourself and your health. Also remember that you have to do 90% of the work, not your agent or your manager. Don’t be lazy, be aware that being an actor is not only being in front of a camera on a set, but it’s hours and hours working on your character, researching and rehearsing, doing castings. I want to conclude with something I always keep in mind: something beautiful about being an actor is that your life can change in a second, you only need one ‘Yes’ to succeed and start something amazing.

What is the first thing you do to research and approach a role?

The first thing I do is to read the script to have the full story in mind, the context and know the characters mine will interact with to build the relationships and connections.

Then, when I begin to work on my character I first start to list what the character and I have in common to see which part of me Nina I can use and bring to the character. Then I can focus on what I need to create and add to my character to bring it to life. For me the context is really important, it gives a lot of clues to the character personality and vibe. If it’s a non fictional character I learn about the person and research the appearance and the look.

What experience do you have in developing accents for specific roles?

The question of accents is a sensitive one! As a French actress in the USA this is a problem I have to face all the time. I need to be able to get rid of my French accent to play non-French characters and it’s not eas! I work with a language coach on my roles and put in hours everyday on my accent, it’s part of my daily routine.

I’m half German and speak German which has actually brought me some German characters here in LA. When I work on this accent for example, I listen to German movies and list the clichés I hear. Clichés in accents are often true.