Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Aline Humbert. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Hi Aline, thanks for joining us today. Do you wish you had started sooner?

That’s a question I’ve been asking myself a lot since I started on this path in 2014. I had just turned 17 and graduated from high school in a small town in France. Where I come from, movies and actors weren’t seen as “real.” They aren’t actual people; it was very far from where I come from. We don’t do extracurricular activities; there isn’t such thing as “theatre kids” because there aren’t theatre programs, especially at school. Even if I spent most of my time watching movies and shows, only in my teens did I realize it was an actual job and that even I could maybe do it. I realized I had never been able to choose just one job for my future because they all looked great on screen. I wanted to do them all. That’s when I realized the only way I could experience everything was to BE on the screen. That may have been the first time I was excited about the future. So, at the end of junior year, I dropped the bomb on my mom. I wasn’t going to medical school anymore. I was finishing High School and trying to become a professional actress.
No one around me knew how to help me. I didn’t know where to go or what to do. I wanted to go straight to the USA and give it a shot. My mom helped me find a great acting school in Paris (Le Cours Florent), which is the number one in France. They accepted me, and I moved there by myself at 17 years old. I spent three years there, trying to understand who I was and what I wanted. I haven’t had the easiest childhood and accumulated a good amount of trauma I was trying to resolve at the same time. I fell in love with acting but had much to learn. I became very confident in my craft. However, France’s cinema industry is challenging to get into because it’s not open to the exterior. I was working hard, but I couldn’t find my way in. So, I tried to focus more on theatre. I went back to this acting school for two years to try to enter the French National Conservatory, and even though I went far, I couldn’t get in either. I was very discouraged and depressed. I returned to college around the same time to get a degree, but I knew I didn’t want to do anything else. I couldn’t do anything else. It’s the only thing that makes me feel good and at my place.
That’s when Covid hit. I couldn’t not act. So, I decided that if France wouldn’t take me, I would return to the initial dream and go to the USA. I knew I had to work on my acting in English, so I auditioned for a school in Los Angeles (The American Academy of Dramatic Arts) while we were in quarantine. They took me, and I had to deal with the whole visa and immigration thing. I was hoping to start auditioning right away but wasn’t allowed because all I could get was a student visa, and you can’t work in the US with a student visa. Now that I have graduated, I have started a one-year post-study program that allows me to work in the US. It started right when the strike started!
Right now, at 26, I am finally starting to get in.
Sometimes, I get sad thinking of all the time it took me to get there. If I had realized sooner it was a job I could do, I could have started the process earlier. I could have started working earlier. It makes me sad that there are younger roles I won’t be able to do anymore.
But at the same time, I know how much I have learned in this process. I am so thankful for all the experiences and people that taught me. I matured and healed so much. That’s something that can’t be rushed. I didn’t have the same chances as an American to start with because of where I come from. I don’t have family that could move with me to a bigger city where I could have started acting earlier. I did all that by myself, and I don’t see how I could have done any of it as a young child. I do wish I had started sooner, but I know it had to happen this way. And when I look back at the road I took, I am very proud of how far I’ve come.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I have always loved movies and shows. When I was younger, I would put a film on and escape. That’s how I coped. I would also invent stories and play by myself. My mom often told me she had rarely seen a child with that much imagination. Even though I realized acting was a job in my late teens, I know I have always been attracted to it because when I decided that’s what I wanted to do, that was the first time all the puzzle pieces fit together, and I felt at my place.

I also had this fantastic literature teacher in high school who taught us the figures of speech through pictures and how the way something is filmed or photographed changes its whole message. It made me interested in the techniques used to film movies.

I have always been interested in psychology and law, which makes me a strong actress.
A teacher once told me, “An actor is the defense attorney of the character they’re playing,” it resonated a lot with me. Indeed, no one cares about you; it’s the character, and no matter how messed up this character is, they have their own agenda and reasons. It is not my job to judge them but to understand them. No one is the villain in their own story.
I am trilingual in French, English, and Italian, which, in addition to being a strength to play characters from different places, makes me see things differently. Indeed, speaking another language is like endorsing another way of thinking, of connecting things. It helps me understand my characters on another level. I love to know how and why someone is the way they are. Why do they react a certain way? Why this word and not another? Why this reaction? How will what happened before change how they are in this particular moment? I guess my difficult childhood and the traumas that followed helped me be more empathetic and understand/relate to almost anything. I love to read a script because I can immediately see the whole scene playing in my head. It has not always been this way; it came with practice, but one of my biggest strengths as an actress is understanding and empathy. Now, when I get a text, I immediately understand all the minuscule details most people won’t even notice, which is something that I think makes my acting more profound and more interesting.

I’m super thankful for my European professional theatre training. I have considerable discipline and expectations from myself. I quickly learn many lines and with good spontaneous script analysis. When you are acting in general but even more in front of an audience, it’s like jumping in the unknown without a net, so preparation is everything to make it as smooth as possible. Where I’ve been trained, one of their goals was to eliminate the “weak” as soon as possible. Think of it as boot camp. It’s swim or drawn. I wouldn’t say it’s something I support for many reasons, and I don’t advise it for everyone, but I don’t regret it. I must admit it surely gives you tough skin and teaches you to work.
European theatre is also focused on new forms and new ways of doing things. I am used to being asked to make strong, bold choices, and I’m not afraid of making them.

In addition, I have been told I’m very directable. I think that comes from how I learn my lines, with zero intention to explore them once my body knows them better than I do. I am not attached to a certain way in which I learned them, and on top of it, it makes my acting more organic because I don’t think about the following line, just the thoughts that drive me to say it, like in real life. I have also been a directing/pedagogical assistant in my professional acting school in France, which helped me understand the director’s side and what they see or want way more easily.

I have this visceral passion for acting. Once I’m on a project, I am 200% in it.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

Growing up, movies were one of my only escapes. Stories save people. Art saves people. If, with my work, I can offer one person the same feeling of lightness and happiness I have when I’m watching something on TV or in the theatres, it would mean everything to me.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

I feel like my whole journey illustrates resilience, from moving all alone while still a minor in a big city to following a dream, giving up on a job that’s more “socially” accepted, etc. However, I think moving to America shows my resilience the most because I did it all by myself without help. I dealt with immigration. I asked for money from the bank for tuition (since education is free in France, I didn’t have enough funding without the bank’s help). I took my first job, which wasn’t acting, and worked like crazy in France to buy myself a car in LA. I learned to drive by myself because I couldn’t afford lessons and never had a license in France. I learned a new culture. I left my home and my country and went through hell a few times in the process, all that to follow a dream.
I never had a very supportive family, except for my mom, but she doesn’t know how to help me, so I’m very proud of how far I’ve come by myself without a real support system, like a big girl, and that I’m still going.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @aline_humbert
• Other: Actors Access : https://resumes.actorsaccess.com/alineh

Image Credits
Isabel Lawrence Becca Van Bockern