Last Updated on October 26, 2025 by Allison Coe
Jean Dujardin WON the Oscar for Best Actor for The Artist! Hard to believe that in just 6 years he went from ‘Brice de Nice’… to the first Frenchman to win the Oscar… wow.
Jean Dujardin has been called the French George Clooney… but did you know that he is also the French Keanu Reeves… as in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and Point Break?
And that the closet where this delicious cinematic skeleton resides in is Nice?
Yes it’s true, in 2005, suave Oscar-nominated Jean Dujardin played Brice de Nice, a goof-ball surfer-dude living in our fair city… where, actually, there are no waves.
The synopsis from IMDB: Brice, a motherless super rich 30-year-old teenager fancies himself a trendy surfer. Only he never stepped out of Nice where the sea remains desperately calm and flat. Brice awaits a giant wave like the one he knows happened in 1979….
(Insider joke: the 1979 wave was from a mini-tsunami when the half-built runway at the Nice airport collapsed into the sea!).
….In the meantime, what he lacks in technique he compensates in style. Yellow T-shirt, yellow hair, yellow parties, he created his own little world. One morning, his father is sent to jail and “Brice from Nice” is left penniless. He first decides to find out about that thing called “work” at a local restaurant, but then decides robbing a bank (a la heist in ‘Point Break’) is way easier. While escaping after a failed attempt, he meets Marius. His new best buddy has an idea: all it takes is for Brice to win the $100,000 prize at the “world underground surf cup”. It would help if Brice had surfed a big wave at least once in his life…
For more on the Jean Dujardin phenom (he is not only the French George Clooney, but also the French Brangelina… who knew?), here’s Why the French Adore Jean Dujardin from the Guardian, and The New Yorker’s take on Brice.
Stream The Brice Man (with English subtitles)
Photos licensed under Creative Commons, Wikipedia.