He’s among the leading names in the world of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and online education. While India-based French entrepreneur Hadelin de Ponteves is really passionate about AI and equipping the youth with it, the 31-year-old also has an artiste in him.
In fact, he’s a trained actor who is now set to debut with Indian films. Ask him why cinema interests him, and Hadelin says, “I was always inspired by cinema and wanted to get into acting. But I wanted to build a business first and get financial security. Now that I have financial security and a team that runs the business, I can focus completely on acting. I had always done stage acting, but just as a hobby on the side of my studies, my work at Google, and then my business. Now I am doing film acting professionally.”
Hadelin has two film projects coming up. One is a Punjabi action-comedy directed by Smeep Kang, and the second one is a drama directed by Hansal Mehta. In the action-comedy, Hadelin plays the role of Sam, who comes to India from Canada and falls in love with an Indian woman, who is the sister of a very conservative violent man. In the drama, he plays the role of a chef,
Interestingly, Hadelin like several Bollywood films and actors. His favourite films include Kapoor & Sons, Barfi and Ankur, while the list of his favourite actors consists of Irrfan Khan, Ranbir Kapoor, Rajkummar Rao, Deepika Padukone and Alia Bhatt.
Hadelin is a trained actor and he’s content that all that he learnt over the years is coming in handy now. Talking about his training, he says, “I did a lot of theatre in Los Angeles, Paris, and Dubai. I also took many acting workshops in the same cities, but mostly in LA and NYC. And mostly, I practise acting all the time by myself, by observing people, listening to people, getting to know myself, learning how to have empathy for characters, and doing classic and contemporary monologues from time to time.”
