LE BOOK sits with Isaak Dessaux

Actor, model, content creator, magazine writer at 24, Isaak Dessaux refuses to pick a lane. Not out of indecision, but out of a deep, almost philosophical conviction: following your instincts isn't a luxury. It's a necessity.

He walks in carrying something hard to name a warmth that makes you lean in, a way of talking that feels both spontaneous and precise. Isaak Dessaux is 24 years old. He grew up in Dreux. He lives in Paris. And he fits into no box, which, he'll tell you, is exactly where he intends to stay.

Refusing to Choose Is a Choice

Actor, model, TikTok creator with 200,000 followers, magazine writer: all of it looks scattered. But in person, it feels like a system. When asked whether he feels pressure to define himself in a single role, his answer is quick and absolute:

"I don't feel pressure to define myself in one role. I feel a need to do many things and follow my desires."

He goes further. "I dream of playing in cinema, theatre, on stage. I think it's what I do in life because it makes me happy." There's something unusual in the way he says that no performance anxiety, no career calculus. Just a clean, uncluttered statement of intent.

He traces this back to childhood. He remembers raising his hand in fifth grade before class started, asking his teacher Mme Le Goff for permission to tell a joke. Already, the impulse was there. "What makes me happy is talking to people or making them laugh." The desire wasn't about fame. It was about connection. He understood early that this could be a job, and that it should stay instinctive, untouched by strategy.

"I want my desires to be deeply pure, because if you do it with a beating heart, I think you do it better. I would be too unhappy not to feel completely free  and to have to silence part of myself in order to express another part. I make the choice to do what I love most."

15 Seconds, 8 Million Views, and a Theory About People

On TikTok, he refuses to think like a brand. Social media, for him, is closer to what his mother does at home: printing photographs and covering walls with them. A record of time passing. Not a product. Not a pitch deck.

"The most important thing for me is to follow my desires, follow my instincts, move at my own pace. Maybe I'd have more subscribers if I thought about it differently. But then I wouldn't be free."

His most-watched video proves the point. Fifteen seconds. He approaches a woman on the street. She says: "I don't speak French." He replies: "Okay. Well. I don't care. Excuse me." Eight million views. No punchline. No edit. No strategy.

"I think it's because I break a barrier," he says. "We assume there's a wall between us and other people. But we're right next door. And when you actually exchange even for three seconds you realize you're not so different." That instinct, he believes, is the one thread connecting all his work: the magazine interviews, the sketches, the street videos, the acting. He is always, fundamentally, trying to close the distance.

His characters come from the same place. Not from a notebook or a whiteboard from conversations. "I talk to my friends and a joke keeps coming back. Or I get stuck on an accent for two weeks. They can't take it anymore, but they're still laughing. Then, one morning phone up. Improv. Done."

The Actor, Learning in Real Time

His first film role arrived the same way everything else does: suddenly. His agent sent him a message on a Wednesday at 3:42 pm. They spoke at 3:45. By 3:51, he said yes. "Instinctively."

Un Cœur Perdu, directed by Frédéric Lavigne, is a story the director has carried since the nineties something that marked him so deeply he poured everything into making it. Isaak plays a character who is, in some ways, his opposite: closed, secretive, hiding an illness, holding everything close. The producers had initially imagined someone older, heavier, more obviously burdened.

On set, the crew kept telling him: "Talk less."

"Every night I got into the taxi full of emotion and an immense fatigue. And it was wonderful. Something in me kept saying: this is what I want to do every day. I need it."

Before going on stage or into a scene, he has a ritual. "I always want to join my hands and look up" he says. "I think it's just human nature. There's always a moment where you want to reach for something bigger than yourself. Whoever is listening help me make this great."

He dreams of working with Xavier Dolan and Céline Sciamma. He brings up Truffaut, and the Antoine Doinel cycle the idea of a character who grows across films, aging in real time on screen. "I would have loved that" he says quietly. "I want to take advantage of who I am right now, at 24. What I can give today, I might give differently in two years."

A first feature film is coming in autumn. A very different character. He says: "I hope to give everything."

Dreux, Paris, and the Freedom That Costs Something

He grew up in Dreux. At 15, every Friday, he took the train to Paris. Came back Monday. His parents worried, but let him go. "I wanted freedom in all its forms. It was never about geography."

He speaks about Dreux with warmth the teachers who held him up, the friends with whom he shot first short films, the theatre teacher Marguerite-Marie Lozac who gave up everything to start her own troupe, who married a man with a Golf and divorced him because she refused to be known only as someone's wife. She became Marie-France Lagarde, one of his most beloved characters. "The most important thing" he says, "is never to laugh at people but always with them."

Then he describes arriving in Paris and the sharpness of that arrival:

"When you get to Paris, you understand that Paris doesn't wait for you. But I had waited long enough. So I went to find Paris the way it deserves. I think sometimes, when you have no choice, things happen. When you're too comfortable, you forget to move. It's good to get up from your chair. I say it because I'm saying it to myself, too."

Only the Beginning

Near the end of the interview, the question comes: what doesn't your audience know about you yet?

He thinks for a moment. Then:

"What they don't know about me for now is that it's only the beginning. And that we're going to give everything."

No performance in it. No bravado. Just a quiet certainty from someone who has spent years moving toward something and can finally feel it getting closer.

At 24, with a debut film wrapping, an autumn stand-up show in the works, and a theatre school he wants to open Isaak is not in a hurry. He is urgent. The distinction matters. Hurry is panic. Urgency is purpose.

He said something early in the conversation, almost in passing, that keeps coming back: "I feel an urgency to follow my instincts." Not pressure. Urgency. Pressure comes from outside. Urgency comes from within. With him, everything comes from within.

All photos by Romain Manciot