Paul Kircher: A Star Is Born

Jonathan Anderson has a brilliant eye for casting creative people. At Loewe, the Northern Irish designer spent 11 years building a community that stretched far beyond fashion, drawing in everyone from Daniel Craig, Josh O’Connor and Greta Lee to Maggie Smith, Ayo Edebiri and Omar Apollo. They never felt like ambassadors in the traditional sense – more like characters in Anderson’s ever-expanding world. And with his eponymous brand, JW Anderson, it was Archie Madekwe, A$AP Rocky and Dree Hemingway who became part of his irreverent, character-driven universe.

In early June last year, Anderson was appointed as the sole creative director of Dior, bringing with him a talented troupe of well-dressed men and women. Alongside long-standing names like Robert Pattinson and Lewis Hamilton, he has opened up the doors to a new generation, with Sabrina Carpenter, Kylian Mbappé and Roger Federer among those ushering in Anderson’s next chapter. And now, one of French cinema’s brightest young stars has stepped up to bat: enter Paul Kircher.

Kircher is the latest face to populate the Dior universe, thanks to, of course, the prolific Anderson. But that’s not to minimise the impressive achievements of the young performer, who’s already played the leads in films like genre-bending sci-fi adventure The Animal Kingdom, which saw him nominated for the César Award for Most Promising Actor in 2024. He also starred in the deeply affecting Winter Boy and the coming-of-age drama And Their Children After Them, which won him the Marcello Mastroianni Award for Best Young Actor at the Venice Film Festival in 2024.

Anderson has always gravitated towards people with a distinct point of view. Across those films, Kircher, who appeared in Dior’s summer 2026 campaign, has developed a knack for playing boys caught in transition. Émile, in The Animal Kingdom, deals with the awkwardness of adolescence while his body begins mysteriously transforming into something animal. Then there’s Lucas in Winter Boy, who navigates grief in tandem with his first love. Anthony, in And Their Children After Them, meanwhile, spends endless summers chasing adulthood long before he knows what that actually looks like. They are characters searching for themselves, often stumbling towards whatever comes next.

But as introspective as his oeuvre proves to be, Kircher is moving on. “At the time [I filmed them], I could relate [to the characters] a lot,” he says. “But now I’ve passed that period and I feel like I’m somewhere else.”

That sense of growing beyond those earlier roles mirrors the way he talks about his career. Acting was always close. His mother, Irène Jacob, won the Best Actress award at Cannes in 1991 for Krzysztof Kieślowski‘s The Double Life of Véronique, while his father, Jérôme Kircher, has worked across French film and theatre for decades. Yet, despite growing up around performers, Kircher insists acting only became his own after he left school. “I discovered acting with a movie I was in after high school,” he says. Then, while studying geography and economics at uni, something shifted. “I started to watch a lot of James Gray, Sidney Lumet and Gus Van Sant movies, and I worked with an acting coach named Jordan Beswick… That was when [I realised] I wanted to do this. I was 19.”

Beswick has remained a constant ever since. Every role begins there, with hours spent discussing scripts before filming begins. “We would do the psychotherapy of the character,” Kircher says.

His upcoming film Forty Love, set for release in late November, demanded perhaps his most intensive preparation yet. Directed by photographer-turned-filmmaker Pierre-Ange Carlotti, the drama follows an elite tennis player, Sacha Gallo, played by Kircher (“I’m a big fan of tennis, so to play a pro tennis player was a dream”), whose entire life has revolved around the pursuit of Roland-Garros, France’s Grand Slam. Training, discipline and expectation have left little room for anything else until, just as the biggest tournament of Gallo’s life approaches, he begins to realise winning might require something beyond tennis. And that’s where the romance edges in, with Gallo entering into a heated rivalry (pun intended) with a fellow tennis star, played by Romeo Beckham in his acting debut.

The feeling of realising that success demands more from you was something Kircher immediately recognised in himself. “He discovers that to win he has to find another recipe,” he says of the character. “He can’t just play tennis every day because he also wants to have a life, and fall in love… I relate to this character, because when I discovered acting, I was thinking exclusively of acting.” Over time, Kircher “found a way to write my job into my life”, and not the other way around. “It’s what I felt I needed to keep going,” he says.

Preparing physically meant months on court, but also working with French choreographer Stephanie Chen Gundorph to understand how an elite athlete moves beyond simply hitting a ball. “Stephanie helped me with imagining how this character would respond with his body in different situations – how he moves, how he takes up space.”

The project also stars Catherine Deneuve, Guillaume Canet and Benjamin Voisin, but there’s one collaborator Kircher seems particularly excited about. “070 Shake, an artist that I really, really love, is scoring the music [alongside Johan Lenox],” he says.

That kind of appreciation for collaborators over celebrity perhaps explains why Dior, and Anderson specifically, appealed to him. Rather than talking about collections or craftsmanship, Kircher speaks about the designer himself. “I was interested in getting to know Jonathan Anderson,” he says, adding, “If you notice people in Paris, you’ll find that everyone has those Uniqlo jeans by him… He has a massive influence on our generation.” The same goes for London.

When it comes to wearing the clothes, his answer circles back to acting. “When I’m wearing Dior by Jonathan Anderson, I can feel the characters he created, and I like that.” He adds, “When I wear them, I feel they really fit my personality too… They feel right and give me power.” Fashion, he believes, is storytelling.

Ironically, his own wardrobe has never been particularly considered. “I was never buying clothes for myself,” he says. “I was either putting on clothes that I had from the character I was playing at that moment, or the clothes I had from my father.”

As Kircher’s career begins blooming beyond independent French cinema into larger international productions, he returns repeatedly to the importance of remaining grounded. The films that continue to inspire him are still Gus Van Sant’s loose Kurt Cobain biopic Last Days and the Matt Damon drama Gerry, along with Jim Jarmusch‘s gothic fantasy Only Lovers Left Alive – films, he says, whose characters live “their solitude” and move through time differently.

The same instinct seems to guide his own life. “I will always be myself and make time for myself,” he says. It’s a remarkably simple philosophy for an actor whose career is becoming anything but.

10 Men Magazine Issue 64 – FUTURE, LEGACY, HERITAGE – is out on newsstands September 25. Pre-order your copy here. 

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