Jérôme Niel French Actor Known for Smoking Causes Coughing

Early life

Jérôme Niel was born on 14 June 1985 in Trappes, a town in the Yvelines department near Paris. He is also known under the name Jérôme Puydebat. After completing his baccalauréat in economics and social sciences, he first found work selling gardening tools. He then enrolled to study languages at university but stayed only about two and a half months. A few months afterwards he entered a radio school.

Career

Niel moved to Paris and took a job as a switchboard operator at the radio station RMC to cover his rent. While living in the capital he began posting his own videos on YouTube. The music channel MTV took notice and commissioned him to make forty episodes.

In May 2013 the programme Le Grand Journal, broadcast on Canal+, came across his web series Groom Service at an event in Montreux. It hired him to produce episodes with celebrities attending the Cannes Film Festival. When Michel Denisot stepped down as host, Niel carried on working for the programme and made a miniseries called Les Tutos, a format that had already been published online through Studio Bagel. In September 2014 he started a daily miniseries for Canal+ titled Speakerine, shown within Le Grand Journal. Each episode offered a humorous analysis of one of that evening's French television programmes. He has been described as a humorist, choreographer, writer, comedian and video producer. Beyond his own series, he was one of roughly thirty French YouTubers who took part in Imagine Paris, a group video in which they performed John Lennon's song "Imagine".

Screen work

Niel's listed screen credits begin with the 2017 film Le Manoir. In 2018 he appeared in the television series Groom, followed by the series Or de lui in 2021. In 2022 he was in Smoking Causes Coughing, the film that has the widest reach among his credits, with a worldwide box office of about 1.1 million US dollars. In 2023 he appeared in the film Infested and in 2024 in Meet the Leroys.

His most recent entries are two television series dated 2026. In Lucky Luke he plays Joe Dalton, and he also has a credit in Paolo. In total his filmography lists eight titles, four of them films and four of them television series. Smoking Causes Coughing, Le Manoir and Meet the Leroys are the titles most often cited as his best-known work.