Movies

Matthias Schoenaerts (/ˈʃoʊnɑːrts/; Dutch: ; born 8 December 1977) is a Belgian actor. He made his film debut at the age of 13 in Daens (1992), which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. He is best known for his roles as Filip in Loft (2008), Jacky Vanmarsenille in the Oscar-nominated Bullhead (2011), Ali in the BAFTA and Golden Globe-nominee Rust and Bone (2012), for which he won the César Award for Most Promising Actor, Eric Deeds in The Drop (2014), Bruno von Falk in Suite Française (2015), Gabriel Oak in Far from the Madding Crowd (2015), Hans Axgil in The Danish Girl (2015) and Uncle Vanya in Red Sparrow (2018). Schoenaerts received critical acclaim for his portrayal of an ex-soldier suffering from PTSD in Disorder (2015), and for his performance as an inmate training a wild horse in The Mustang (2019).

In 2015, he was named Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters in France.

Early life
Schoenaerts was born in Antwerp, Flanders, the Dutch speaking region of Belgium. He is the son of actor Julien Schoenaerts (1925–2006) and Dominique Wiche (1953–2016), a costume designer, translator and French teacher. He has an older half brother, Bruno Schoenaerts (born 1953), who is a lawyer. Schoenaerts is of Flemish descent through his father, although his maternal grandmother is from Liège, Wallonia, the French-speaking region of Belgium, and for the first six years of his life he lived with his maternal grandparents in Brussels.

Schoenaerts grew up bilingual, speaking Dutch and French. He is also fluent in English, which he learned by watching American movies.

In 1987, at nine years old, he appeared in a stage production of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince opposite his father, who was also the director. His mother, Dominique, was the costume designer of the play.

He started producing graffiti as a teenager under the pseudonym "Zenith", going to New York to collaborate with the Bronx group TATS CRU.

Schoenaerts was close to becoming a professional association football player and was on the books of Belgian team Beerschot AC, but gave up when he was 16 years old. In 2013, Schoenaerts stated that he was a fan of the Spanish football club FC Barcelona.