As a child, Jean Chevalier dreamt of becoming a footballer. He joined the training center of the Troyes city club, the ESTAC. At the age of 15, he saw a cousin play in a village theater company and decided to abandon his nascent athletic career to become an actor.

At the Troyes Conservatoire, Pascal Broché introduced him to the poems of Boris Vian, namely Qu’est-ce que vous attendez pour m’aimer. Alain Thierry noticed him and his cousin and suggested they interpret the Jean-Michel Ribes’ texts in his show Le Grand Cabaret, which was touring the Champagne-Ardenne region.
At the age of 19, Jean Chevalier was admitted into the Cours Florent in Paris. Bruno Blairet and Nâzim Boudjenah trained him. Boudjenah wrote the role of the Red Fish especially for him, as part of his staging of Maeterlinck’s Blue Bird (L’Oiseau bleu). Alongside Jean-Pierre Garnier, Jean Chevalier embarked on playing emblematic roles of the repertoire, such as Cyrano de Bergerac in Edmond Rostand’s eponymous play, Karl in Friedrich Schiller’s The Robbers and Leonce in Leonce and Lena by Georg Büchner.
He has joined the Conservatoire national supérieur d’art dramatique in Paris where he attended classes taught by Yann-Joël Collin, Nada Strancar and Didier Sandre. Caroline Marcadé introduced him to dance, Alain Zappfel to singing and Yvo Mentens to the art of clowning. During his third year, after a workshop at the Conservatoire, director Clément Hervieu-Léger offered him a role in Impromptu 1663 based on texts by Molière, which was shown at the Festival d’Avignon in 2017.

Jean Chevalier appeared in Philippe Garrel’s film Lover for a Day (L’Amant d’un jour), which was selected for the Cannes Festival Directors’ Fortnight in May 2017. In September 2017, he played Hippolyte in Seneca’s Phaedra, which was staged by Les Bourlingueurs, a multidisciplinary group originating at the Festival des Effusions in Normandy. With the guitar player Lionel Privat, he presented the Bourvil, du rire aux larmes song recital at the Hall de la Chanson in the Parc de la Villette. In December 2017, he played at the Théâtre Déjazet in Surtout ne vous inquiétez pas, a show staged by Yvo Mentens for the 2017 graduating the students of the Conservatoire.

Jean Chevalier became pensionnaire of the Comédie-Française on the 1st of February 2018. He reunited with Clément Hervieu-Léger who cast him as Otto in The Awakening of Spring by Frank Wedekind.

During the 2018/2019 season, Jean Chevalier plays in Bergman’s Fanny and Alexandre by Julie Deliquet and in Brecht’s Life of Galileo by Éric Ruf. He can also be seen in the rerun of Victor Hugo’s Lucrezia Borgia and Molière’s Les Fourberies de Scapin, both directed by Denis Podalydès.