At the age of 17, Milo Machado-Graner is already familiar to audiences in Cannes. First, he appeared as the sight-impaired son in Justine Triet’s 2023 arthouse smash Anatomy of a Fall, then he came back the following year with Filmlovers!, Arnaud Desplechin’s poetic ode to cinema. This year, you’ll find him closing Critics’ Week with Goodbye Cruel World, a beautiful, bittersweet fairytale that plays like Moonrise Kingdom, if it were made by Nouvelle Vague legend François Truffaut as part of his Antoine Doinel series.

Machado-Graner — who looks more than a little like Truffaut’s 400 Blows star Jean-Pierre Léaud — plays Otto, a teenage loner who is at the end of his tether after being bullied by his classmates and writes a letter telling the whole school that he is going to kill himself as a result. But his suicide attempt is thwarted, and despite his embarrassed determination to stay missing, Otto is discovered by Léna (Jane Beever), who hides him away in a disused room at her mother’s guest house, where they plan to elope.

The part was originally ear-marked for Machado-Graner’s brother Solan, who is also an actor. “He did some auditions, but they said he was too young, and so they went a bit older. I met Felix at a casting and we did some scenes, especially the scenes at the beginning, before the suicide attempt. There was a real difference between the beginning and the end of the audition, and I think Felix saw that we could work well together. He called me a day or two after that, saying, ‘OK, we want you on a callback.’ And when we did the callback, he said, ‘OK, you’re in. Welcome!’”

Why did he want to do it? “I think it’s because it’s really different. I like the idea, as an actor, of playing very different characters. My big one was Anatomy of a Fall, where I played a blind child, really introverted. But this role took me to a different place, a place I didn’t know, and it was a love story, something I’d never played before.”

Cannes is particularly special to the actor because his first time there took him all the way to the Oscars, where Triet’s film had five nominations and won Best Screenplay. “We did the campaign and it was really intense,” he says. “I think we felt relieved, but also because, I mean, it was a powerful moment because the French selection committee didn’t decide to send us for best foreign picture, so we were taking our revenge maybe. And so, we partied like we never partied before. The Vanity Fair party was really memorable — grabbing a burger next to Steven Spielberg. It was like we were saying, ‘OK, we didn’t do all these interviews, all that campaigning for nothing!’”