Georges St-Pierre at Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal, on November 4, 2021.
Photo credit: Diarmuid Greene / Web Summit
Former UFC champion Georges St-Pierre will play a member of the Thibault family in Jared Keeso’s new Crave comedy I Kill the Bear, premiering November 6. The Quebec-born performer has spent more than 15 years taking film and television roles alongside and after his fighting career, including appearances in Marvel productions and the French-language Netflix drama La Cage.
Bell Media has cast St-Pierre, Keeso, Sarah-Maude Beauchesne and Jonathan Torrens as members of the Thibaults, a fourth-generation Franco-Ontarian family whose business involves handling bears for film productions. After a century in the trade, the family plans to make its current film their last. The six-part series was filmed in the Sudbury, Ontario, area and is produced by New Metric Media, which also made Keeso’s Letterkenny and Shoresy.
St-Pierre’s previous film and television roles have largely drawn on his martial arts background. His next appearance places him in a comedy with an ensemble that includes Kristin Kreuk, Adrian Holmes, Scott Thompson and Dylan Playfair, alongside the actors playing the Thibault family.
From early action films to Marvel
St-Pierre had already entered the film business while he was still an active mixed martial artist. One of his first credits was the 2009 action film Never Surrender, followed by a far more prominent appearance as Georges Batroc in Marvel Studios’ Captain America: The Winter Soldier in 2014. Batroc, a French mercenary, fights Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) during the film’s opening operation aboard a hijacked ship.
That fight was built for the camera rather than the octagon. In a later interview with Global News, St-Pierre said the movie sequence used savate, a French kickboxing style, and acrobatic movements. He told Forbes in 2021 that he had taken the original Batroc role while concentrating on MMA because he had long wanted to act, particularly in a superhero movie.
More action-film credits followed, including Kickboxer: Vengeance (2016), starring Canadian martial artist and actor Alain Moussi with Jean-Claude Van Damme, and Cartels (2017). In 2021, St-Pierre returned as Batroc in Marvel’s Disney+ series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, seven years after the character’s first appearance. This time his on-screen opponent included Sam Wilson, played by Anthony Mackie.
Learning to act after retirement
By 2021, St-Pierre was speaking publicly about the difference between an athlete performing a fight and an actor performing a scene. He told Global News that a punch or kick for the camera has to be exaggerated so viewers can see it, whereas that same movement would leave a fighter exposed in an actual contest. He also said he had been unable to attend acting classes during his first Marvel appearance because of his competitive schedule.
After retirement, that changed. St-Pierre told Global News he was taking acting, audition and English classes, comparing his progress to starting again at white belt. In an April 2021 interview with Agence QMI, published by TVA Nouvelles, he said he had once assumed people were born good actors. He had come to see acting as a skill developed through training and repetition, and discussed the need to adapt to other performers once filming begins.
The possibility of comedy was already on his mind. Asked by Forbes in August 2021 about doing comedy or action-comedy, St-Pierre acknowledged that his background would likely continue to lead to action parts but said he would also welcome more serious and funnier roles. The new Crave series now adds a comedy credit to a filmography dominated by action and martial arts.
French-language screen work
St-Pierre’s television work also crosses languages. His Marvel character Batroc speaks French, and a 2021 report by TVA Nouvelles noted that St-Pierre dubbed his own performance in the French-language version of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. In 2024, he appeared in La Cage (The Cage), the French-language Netflix drama about an aspiring mixed martial arts fighter. Netflix listed him among several real-life MMA figures featured in the fictional series.
I Kill the Bear has a specifically Franco-Ontarian family at its centre, giving St-Pierre a role in a Canadian story set apart from the combat-centred productions in his credits. Keeso created and wrote the comedy, while brothers Dan and Sean Skene directed the episodes. Bell has identified the Thibault performers as members of the same family, without specifying their individual relationships in the October 6 announcement.
Crave will release two episodes on Friday, November 6, followed by two more on November 13 and the final pair on November 20. For St-Pierre, the new series follows the acting lessons and wider range of roles he was discussing five years earlier, with a principal role in a Canadian ensemble comedy now among his screen credits.
