Félix Kysyl Transforms into Moulin: Inside His Battle of Gaulle Prep!

Antonin Baudry’s “The Battle of Gaulle” continues to captivate audiences, boasting ratings of 4.4 and 4.5 out of 5 for its two parts.

After a slow start, the duology is now poised to be one of the French cinematic successes of the summer, having already amassed 4.5 million admissions for its two parts. This offers us a chance to reveal some behind-the-scenes secrets.

Today, we focus on the character of Jean Moulin, portrayed by Félix Kysyl. Normally, playing a historical figure involves digging through archives, finding interviews, videos, and photos. For this particular character, Félix Kysyl encountered a major obstacle—the extreme scarcity of archives.

As he shared in an interview with We Love Cinema, it was impossible to “mimic exactly, which ultimately allowed for more creative freedom.” There are no real audio recordings of Moulin. “For his voice, I only saw a brief clip where it’s actually quite hard to hear him, so there was no reference for the voice“, he noted on the show Quotidien.

“The best resources we had were testimonies from people who knew him, particularly a book by his secretary, Daniel Cordier, which was somewhat of a bible for me because it’s written as a diary, day by day. It was great for even capturing Moulin’s personality traits“, he continued at We Love Cinema.

Kysyl mentioned that he chose not to watch other portrayals of the character. Notably, Jean Moulin has been previously portrayed by actors like Patrice Chéreau (in Claude Berri’s film Lucie Aubrac), Francis Huster (in a TV movie by Pierre Aknine), and Charles Berling (in a mini-series by Yves Boisset) since the late 1990s and early 2000s.

A New Portrayal of Moulin This Fall

This fall, an entire film dedicated to Jean Moulin, titled “Moulin” and directed by Laszlo Nemes, will be released. Presented in competition at Cannes last May, Jean Moulin is portrayed by Gilles Lellouche.

Rather than a traditional biopic, the film focuses on a specific period in Moulin’s life. It starts in June 1943. Jean Moulin, the leader of the Resistance, is captured while trying to unify the Secret Army’s forces. Interrogated by Klaus Barbie, the head of the Gestapo in Lyon, Moulin faces a relentless confrontation. His final struggle against manipulation and brutality begins, and the fate of free France hangs in the balance.

How did Gilles Lellouche prepare for the role? He shared some insights with our Belgian colleagues from Surimpressions. “I spoke with historians, met with the director of the Jean Moulin museum in Paris, who explained that there are very few documents about him, that his personality traits remain quite mysterious.

Together with my coach, we started from a peripheral understanding of who this man was, and gradually moved closer to the core of the film and its scenes, which focus on the last days of Moulin’s life, about which very little is actually known. We didn’t know what happened in that German prison in Lyon. I wanted to convey what wasn’t necessarily written. His inner struggle, his way of escaping the horror, the violence, the sounds of people being physically and psychologically tortured.

The first images of “Moulin,” set to release on October 28, 2026

“The Battle of Gaulle” is currently in theaters.