Do we like them?

Do we like Jean Dujardin?

Our score: 6 out of 10. No harmful words of his own turned up, but the record we could open is thin and a couple of projects raised eyebrows.

Jean Dujardin is one of France's best-known actors, and the recent news about him is a film row, not a personal scandal. His latest big role is Jean Luchaire, a French journalist who collaborated with the Nazis during the Occupation, in Xavier Giannoli's Les Rayons et les Ombres, which hit cinemas on 18 March 2026.

The film copped a stoush in France. Some observers accused it of romanticising the far right, as Gala reported, while Giannoli said he hadn't expected the film to take on such political proportions and argued it complicated a story in which the left never collaborated. Dujardin, questioned by Yann Barthès, backed his director and said cinema is a tool for telling national stories.

One of his lines in that interview will raise eyebrows: he said that great dictators are very human and very likeable at the start. Read charitably, that's an actor explaining why you play a collaborator as a person and not a cartoon. Read less charitably, it's a clumsy thing to say while defending that very film. Where you land depends on which you hear.

Earlier, in 2012, posters for his comedy Les Infidèles showed him holding a woman's bare legs. French ad authority ARPP asked for them to come down after public complaints, with its head saying the campaign spread an image of women that damages their dignity. A spokeswoman for Dujardin and the film declined to comment, so we can't say what he made of it.

In 2019 he starred in Roman Polanski's J'accuse. When Valentine Monnier's accusation that Polanski raped her in 1975 was published, which Polanski firmly denies, Dujardin cancelled a TF1 interview to promote the film. Earlier, on France Inter, he said he had a lot of affection and compassion for Adèle Haenel, who accused a director of harassment. One Polanski film is a project, not a pattern.

On the harm test, we found no words or acts of his against LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or the planet. That's honest but thin: the sources we could open were mostly about films, and we found no sourced charity work or causes either. A fuller picture would need more digging in French-language press.