Author Talk: Guillaume Gallienne

In The Mist Drinker (Le Buveur de brume, Stock, 2025), he is meant to spend the night at the National Museum of Tbilisi, but instead finds himself expected at the National Gallery, where the portrait of his great-grandmother, Princess Melita Cholokashvili—known as Babou—has been relocated. There, he begins a dialogue with his Georgian heritage, passed down through Babou, a radiant muse of Georgia’s literary scene in the early 20th century, and his beloved grandmother Caï, his childhood accomplice. By telling their stories, he revisits—with humor and tenderness—the roots of his own identity.

About the author

Guillaume Gallienne is the 513th member of the Comédie-Française, the historic theater company founded in 1680 following the death of Molière. A two-time recipient of the Molière Awards, he has performed nearly fifty roles on stage. His autobiographical stage production Les Garçons et Guillaume, à table ! (Me, Myself and Mum) was adapted into a film in 2013, propelling him to the forefront of French cinema. The film earned him widespread acclaim, including five César Awards, among them Best Film, Best First Film, and Best Actor. On screen, Gallienne has collaborated with leading filmmakers such as Sofia Coppola (Marie Antoinette), Danièle Thompson (Fauteuils d’orchestre, Cézanne et moi), Jalil Lespert (Yves Saint Laurent), Alexandre Astier (Kaamelott), and Wes Anderson (The French Dispatch), among others. For a decade, he brought literary works to life on air with his program Ça ne peut pas faire de mal on France Inter. In 2018, he was Visiting Lecturer at Princeton University. In 2025, he published his first novel, Le Buveur de brumes, a work inspired by his Georgian roots and childhood memories.Guillaume Gallienne is an actor, screenwriter and film director.

He is featured in the upcoming films Bazaar (2026) by Rémi Bezançon and Après (2026) by Kirill Serebrennikov. With the Comédie-Française, he is a part of Ivo Van Hove’s production of Hamlet and is in Molière’s Le Malade imaginaire, directed by Claude Stratz. He is also currently working on an animated adaptation of the French classic Cyrano de Bergerac.

About the moderator

Hugo Pinatel is the artistic director at Atelier de la langue française. He has written several theatrical interpretations, including Sade, le génie du mal, dedicated to the Marquis de Sade and his literary posterity; Poésie et résistance, relating the epic of French resistance poets under the Nazi occupation; and Heureux qui comme Ulysse, exploring the mysteries of Homer’s Odyssey.