This post was originally published on this site

PARIS — Until recently, Arnaud Valois was a masseur with a small studio here. Years before, he had been an actor, with minor success, but he had given up in favor of Thai massage and the yogalike relaxation technique called sophrology.

He took a short break from his new career to act in a small film and ended up on the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival. “We thought it was a good movie,” he said, sipping Perrier last week, “but we didn’t know if people would share this opinion.”

A dramatization of the early years of the militant AIDS activist group Act Up-Paris by Robin Campillo, himself an Act Up member in the early ’90s, “120 Beats Per Minute” won the Cannes jury’s grand prize, effectively second place (behind the Palme d’Or). Variety called it “outstanding,” and Vanity Fair wrote that Mr. Valois is a “persuasive, sensitive performer.”

In the film, Mr. Valois plays Nathan, a newbie agitator who falls into parallel worlds: in with the protesters of Act Up as they stage “die-ins” and other political demonstrations, and in love with Sean (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart), who is H.I.V. positive. He described the intensity of shooting the film start to finish over the course of 10 weeks, and said that watching Mr. Biscayart weaken as he shed weight to play Sean’s wasting illness onscreen was “very emotional.”

Mr. Valois, 33, is of a generation that grew up with AIDS awareness and some forms of treatment, though he remembered clearly being a boy in Lyon when Act Up and Benetton, as a form of political performance as well as protest, unfurled an enormous pink condom over the obelisk in the Place de la Concorde in Paris on Dec. 1 — World AIDS Day — in 1993.

“For me as a kid, it was all spectacle,” he said, looking out over Place de l’Opéra, where an Act Up die-in once took place. In researching the role and speaking with Mr. Campillo, he said: “I realized it was a real cause. They were dying and putting all their strength in that struggle.”

Mr. Valois had expected at most a modest hit among a certain niche crowd in Paris. Instead, the film will open in France in August and has been picked up for distribution in the United States, Britain, Canada, Brazil and Japan.

Mr. Valois now finds himself in the unusual position — unusual, at least, for a masseur who long since gave up the screen — of having an agent fielding calls and offers. He is, at least, friendly with many in Paris’s fashion circles (he was once a model, appearing on runways for Yves Saint Laurent, Jean Paul Gaultier and Dolce & Gabbana) and can call upon his friend Anthony Vaccarello, the creative director of Saint Laurent, to lend an outfit when the occasion demands, as it increasingly does.

After shooting the film last year, he returned to the Montorgueil area, his sophrology and his clients. (They all went on hiatus during filming, he said, and they all returned when he came back.) His practice “helped me to not have a baby blues after the shooting,” he said. “Starting something real and simple. Not having assistants, and someone who comes to your house in the morning and drives you, and hair and makeup … a real life.”

That said, scripts have been arriving at his door. One is “very interesting,” he said, “and I just received a script yesterday that was very interesting, too.”

He was not sure, he said, if he would return to acting. “I’m very happy with my other activities,” he said. “It helps me a lot to be — how do you say it in English? — to be centered.”