'Promising' young French actor investigated over murder

An award-winning French actor is being investigated over the murder of a teenager at a drug dealing point in the southern city of Marseille, a judicial source said on Tuesday.

Dylan Robert, a 23-year-old who wowed the Cannes film festival in 2018 and won the Most Promising Actor prize at France’s equivalent to the Oscars the following year, has denied the accusations, which his lawyers said were based on “rumours”.

The judicial source said Robert was facing charges of murder and attempted murder as part of an organised gang.

Le Monde newspaper reported that he had been accused of driving the scooter used by someone who shot dead a 14-year-old “with no criminal record” using an assault rifle in 2021, during a fight between rival drug gangs in the north of Marseille.

Robert was awarded for his role in “Sheherazade”, a love story between teenagers in the port city.

In the first feature film by director Jean-Bernard Marlin, the non-professional actor plays a 16-year-old freshly out of juvenile detention whose path crosses with a former classmate who has become a sex worker.

In 2020, Robert went on to act alongside several French A-list actors in another film, “DNA”.

But he was detained the same year for his alleged role in the holdup of a restaurant two years earlier, and sentenced to thirty months in jail in 2022 for theft with violence.

At the time, he had been under judicial supervision for around a year after spending 13 months in provisional detention over several violent robbery cases.