Michael R. Roskam

The career of Flemish actor Matthias Schoenaerts went global in 2011. Bullhead made its international debut in Berlin and was later selected as Belgium's candidate for the 2012 Foreign-language Oscar. Meanwhile the 34-year-old claimed his first substantial English-language part in the US remake of Loft, then a leading role in French for Jacques Audiard in Un goût de rouille et d'os.

Those who have worked with Schoenaerts are immediately struck by his presence as an actor. Loft director Erik Van Looy recalls his earliest appearances as a child actor, playing opposite his father Julien on stage in The Little Prince. 'Even then you could see that he had a magnetic presence,' he says. 'Every time he was there he lit up the screen.' Michaël R Roskam, who directed him in Bullhead, says the same thing. 'You feel it immediately, he has this kind of DNA that all great actors have.'

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Early on in Michaël R. Roskam’s debut feature Bullhead, there is a shot of the main character Jacky sitting naked on the edge of a bath in the near dark. It’s an image eerily reminiscent of paintings by Lucian Freud or Francis Bacon. It is often said of these artists that they depict the human body as if it is a lump of flesh in an abattoir. Text Geoffrey Macnab | Portrait Bart Dewaele

In Bullhead, set in the world of hormone smuggling, the slaughterhouse isn’t just a metaphor. The world that Jacky inhabits is one in which cattle are injected with drugs that make them grow quicker so that they can be killed quicker and more profitably.

In the late 1990s, a vet was murdered in Belgium because he pried too closely into what was happening in the slaughterhouses. He had stumbled on a scheme to fatten livestock artificially - and illegally. The farmers behind it intimidated and bribed anyone in a position to reveal what they were doing. The police were slow to respond. After all, you don't expect to the agricultural world to be a hotbed of Mafia corruption. When the vet had exposed the farmers, they had had to destroy the bulls which had been fattened. They were furious at losing thousands of Euros. That's why the vet was killed.

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