Haenel began her career as a child actress, making her film debut with Les Diables at the age of 12, and quickly rose to prominence in the French entertainment industry as a teenager. Haenel was born on 11 February in Paris. Haenel made her film debut in at the age of 12, playing an autistic girl in the Christophe Ruggia film Les Diables. Writing for The Village Voice , Melissa Anderson compared her performance to that of Isabelle Adjani 's in the s and '80s, and declared her a worthy successor to Deneuve in French cinema.
Haenel starred in the Pierre Salvadori crime comedy The Trouble with You , playing a widowed detective based on the French Riviera. David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter noted her performance as evoking the "classic screwball heroine", a departure from her usually more serious roles, and complimented her on the "grace and buoyancy" she brought to the character.
Scott of The New York Times considered Haenel's performance worthy of an Oscar nomination for Best Actress , [ 29 ] and Bilge Ebiri of Vulture described the climax of the film which features Haenel as "one of the finest pieces of acting and one of the most moving images I've seen in eons.
In May , during an interview for German magazine FAQ , Haenel said that she was stepping away from film acting as "I tried to change something from within. She cited the industry as "[defending] a capitalist, patriarchal, racist, sexist world of structural inequality. This means that this industry works hand in hand with the global economic order, in which all lives are not equal".
Haenel's last project was to be The Empire , written and directed by Bruno Dumont , but she explained that she left the film as "it was a dark, sexist and racist world that was defended. The script was full of jokes about cancel culture and sexual violence. I tried to discuss it with Dumont, because I thought a dialogue was possible. I wanted to believe for the umpteenth time that it was not intentional. But it's intentional. The intention was to make a sci-fi film with an all-white cast β and therefore a racist narrative.
