Dancer, breakdancer, tricker, yamakasi… Rachid Youcef has been accumulating singular experiences from an early age and has developed a unique personality and language of his own – both oral and physical.
You can now see him in David Dusa’s Flowers of Evil, where he plays Gecko, a young Parisian bellhop who meets Anahita, an exile from the Iranian uprising.
1) How did you work on creating the couple with Alice Belaïdi (winner of the 2010 Molière Award for Best Female Newcomer)?
It all worked out very naturally with Alice, although I did have some qualms about kissing her…It’s kind of funny: the first time I was acting with a girl, I had to kiss her and pretend that we were a couple. But when we heard “Action!”, I was no longer the single Rachid, but Gecko, working at the hotel and dating, so it all came easily enough.
2) The very violent images of the suppression of Iranian protests in the film are real. How did you first see those images? On YouTube, like your character?
I had already seen them before shooting started – David (the director) had shown me some. I remember that he had been very moved. I had trouble looking at them, I thought it was horrible. I remember seeing the last one in the film, the picture of Neda – I discovered it right in the middle of filming, and it was really hard to look at :s!
3) Capoeira is a martial art that, since the 18th century, expresses rebellion against a slave-driving society…Is your character, Gecko, expressing himself through dance also as a form of rebellion?
First, a little clarification: the sport I practice is often mistaken for capoeira, but it is not the same sport! It is actually called “tricking” or “extreme martial arts.” As the name indicates, these are extreme artistic martial arts that mix together breakdancing and martial art movements. The techniques are above all aesthetic and focus on creating beautiful motion – even though some of the martial art moves are actually pretty powerful, LOL!
Gecko resembles me at a certain point in my life. I remember how a friend and I would often dare each other to do stuff like “Dance in the street, on the subway”…it was a little scary to occupy public space in this way, but we ended up enjoying it. I think that in the film, Gecko has a thirst for freedom and his dancing is like a challenge to society, to this cliché of the grumpy, sulking Parisian, meant to show how to occupy a public space and subvert it; he’s like a pirate, but with a “smile attitude” =)
Website: fleurs-du-mal.net/
Sébastien - unifrance.org 
