Having trained at the Conservatoire national supérieur d’art dramatique, Denis Podalydès co-wrote, in 1996, André Amoureux a show which won several awards.

He made his debut at the Comédie-Française in 1997 by interpreting Mikhaïl Alexandrovitch Rakitine in Ivan Turgenev’s A Month in the Country directed by Andreï Smirnoff. In 2000, he became the 505th sociétaire of the Company and received the Molière Award for Best Newcomer in Theatre for his performance in Gogol’s The Government Inspector directed by Jean-Louis Benoit, who had already directed him in Molière’s Les Fourberies de Scapin in 1997. They reunited in 2004 for Corneille’s Le Menteur.

Denis Podalydès can play just about anything. Numerous renowned directors have cast him for wide ranging roles: Jean-Pierre Miquel in Marivaux’s Le Legs and later Molière's The Misanthrope; Philippe Adrien in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia; Pascal Rambert in his own play Une vie; Matthias Langhoff in Lenz, Léonce et Léna after Georg Büchner; Piotr Fomenko in Ostrovsky’s The Forest; Galin Stoev in Corneille’s L’Illusion comique and Molière's Tartuffe; Éric Ruf in Racine’s Bajazet; and finally Jacques Lassalle in Chekhov’s Platonov or Fatherlessness, Goldoni’s Il Campiello and Ödön von Horváth's Figaro’s Divorce.

Brigitte Jaques-Wajeman entrusted him with playing Don César in Victor Hugo’s Ruy Blas, Catherine Hiegel with Harpagon in Molière's The Miser (L’Avare), Dan Jemmett with Calogero di Spelta in La Grande Magie by Eduardo De Filippo and later with the title role in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. For the creation of The Damned after the screenplay by Visconti, Badalucco and Medioli at the Festival d’Avignon in 2016, Ivo van Hove cast him as Baron Konstatin von Essenbeck. The show was taken over at the Salle Richelieu.

At the Comédie-Française, Denis Podalydès staged Fantasio by Musset, Ce que j’appelle oubli by Laurent Mauvignier, Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand, a show that garnered six Molière Awards, including that of Best Director and Best Public Theatre Show. He followed up on this success by directing Lucrezia Borgia by Victor Hugo and Les Fourberies de Scapin by Molière.

At the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, he staged Molière’s Le Bourgeois gentilhomme in 2012, Chekhov’s On the Harmful Effects of Tobacco in 2014, Maeterlinck’s The Death of Tintagiles in 2015 and Marivaux’s Le Triomphe de l’amour in 2018. He has equally directed operas such as Fortunio by Messager and Le Comte Ory by Rossini at the Opéra-Comique, Donizetti’s Don Pasquale and Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées.

Besides television films and short features, Denis Podalydès has appeared in about a hundred films. He co-wrote and played in the majority of movies by his brother Bruno. He has also filmed with Arnaud Desplechin, Ducastel and Martineau, Raoul Ruiz, Bertrand Tavernier, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Michael Haneke, Alain Resnais, Xavier Durringer and Christophe Honoré_._

During the 2018/2019 season, among other things, Denis Podalydès will be playing in Shakespeare’s The Twelfth Night Or What You Will by Thomas Ostermeier, Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny et Alexandre directed by Julie Deliquet, Euripide's Electre / Oreste by Ivo van Hove.