The gray areas of Zineb Triki

There are the extroverts and the shy ones. Those who make the front page of magazines and the discreet ones. And then there is Zineb Triki. For this very reserved woman, being interviewed in the middle of the Cannes Film Festival is as much pleasure as torture. “It is important to take a certain distance in the choice of roles as well as in the way of evolving in this profession,” she confirms in her soft voice. The actress may have made a lasting impression with her character of Nadia El Mansour in “The Office of Legends”, but she is rare.

With “The Eagles of the Republic”, the Swede Tarik Saleh closes his unvarnished trilogy on his country of heart, Egypt, which rejected him. After “Cairo Confidential” and “The Cairo Conspiracy”, this time he questions the relationship between artists, politics and power. Zineb Triki plays a mysterious woman, both wife of a general and mistress of a star actor on whom a pro-government film is imposed, played by Fares Fares. “For Tarik as for Fares, or Suzanne, my character, everything is decided in the play of mirrors and the unsaid. I play a woman full of gray areas. Loving, fragile, manipulative in a corrupt world? Do you really need to know this? I don’t think so…” She hits the nail on the head when we draw a parallel between this woman and Nadia El Mansour, explaining that “each role is a new blank page for an actress”. Finally, wouldn’t Suzanne and Nadia also be like a mirror thrown at Zineb? “I like that way of looking at it,” she said. Cinema can be a reflection of our own reality. But wouldn’t it rather be the negative of a photo of our lives? »

Around Zineb Triki, a soft, enigmatic veil remains. This native of Casablanca, nurtured during her youth by spectacular Egyptian cinema, has a unique journey. Studies in political science, master’s degree in audiovisual, from Paris to New York. In 2015, the role of a lifetime was offered to him by Éric Rochant. Five seasons and an international triumph for “The Office of Legends” which she will go through discreetly but surely. She toured with Jacques Audiard, Laurent Cantet and the duo Mathieu Delaporte-Alexandre de La Patellière (“The best is yet to come”, with Patrick Bruel) and ended up in Hollywood in a season of the series “Homeland”. But naturalness comes back at a gallop: “In this job, I need a secret garden, a time for reflection, even moments of silence,” the actress explains. I think I couldn’t do it if I was too stimulated, if I kept making suggestions. » She may have two films on display at the same time (she also plays in “T’as pas change”, by Jérôme Commandeur), Zineb Triki remains elusive.