Born in Montreal in 1996 to Senegalese parents, Madeleine Sarr grew up in Villeray. It was while watching the show La petite vie, with her father, that she discovered the pleasure of playing. And began to become fascinated by this profession. In high school, at Père-Marquette, the teenager joined an extracurricular theater troupe. But the young woman has no illusions about her future in theater.
“It’s something my parents didn’t see me doing,” she remembers. My mother kindly suggested that after CEGEP I go to university “for something more serious”. I kept telling my mother: Do you want me to become a doctor and make $200,000 a year while being unhappy? I prefer to eat pasta and do theater [laughs]. »
It must be said that in the early 2000s in Quebec, the theater and television industry was whiter than white.
However, her parents did not discourage their daughter at all when she told them that she wanted to enter the National School in 2016. “And today, my parents are super happy for me,” she says. .
Between his beginnings at the National School and today, things have changed at great speed! “I look at Viola Davis, Lupita Nyong’o and several other black actresses. I work more and more with colleagues of Haitian and African origin, she says. Our body shape, our facial features, our way of moving… all of that is not the same. I started out as a work of deconstruction. »
The 27-year-old actress completed her acting training… at the start of the pandemic, when all the theaters closed. “Leaving theater school, it’s already nothingness. With COVID, it was like double nothingness! But everyone was in the same boat and I’m not naturally worried. »
Then everything happened. After the Quat’Sous auditions, in 2021, he was offered projects and laboratories. The professor and director of the ENT, Frédéric Dubois, then suggested that he resume At what time do we die? at Quat’Sous.
Then came the TV roles and a call from Brigitte Haentjens to play in Rome. “I thought she was going to offer me a role as a plebeian, who we can see in the backstage… But no: she’s offering me Cleopatra! » When she received the Critics’ Prize last December, she had her marks: “Her interpretation of Cleopatra was able to infuse a unique, astonishing and striking vision into a very well-known historical figure,” wrote the Montreal jury. Concluding that she had “dazzled the critics”…
The career of this young premiere who dreams of playing several major roles is launched!