Xavier Dolan (left) and Adele (right), making the music video for the single “Hello.”
Xavier Dolan (born March 20, 1989), sometimes credited as Xavier Dolan-Tadros, is a Canadian actor and filmmaker. He is responsible for directing the music video for Adele’s “Hello.”
Dolan expressed enjoyment working with Adele, saying, “It was a privilege to direct the music video for Adele’s beautiful, heartbreaking song ‘Hello.’ When I first heard it, all the images appeared clearly in my head — and her trust and generosity allowed me to work with abandon artistically and emotionally, like she always does. It made me extremely proud.”[1]
Adele and Xavier Dolan.
Adele chose him to direct the video after seeing his debut film, I Killed My Mother. “In I Killed My Mother, there’s this sort of digital journal,” Dolan said. “There are some sort of video episodes where the character confides his deepest secrets and states of minds with an anonymous interlocutor filming him in his bathroom and it’s all in black-and-white. [Adele] liked that about I Killed My Mother, which is one of the things I most liked about the movie also. We went in a completely different direction after.”[2]
Because of their collaboration, Adele was in talks to join Dolan’s first English-language project, The Death and Life of John F Donovan.[3] “I’m sure I’ll get some flak for this, but I actually would like to act after working with Xavier,” she told Kiss FM. “I would be in a film for him, definitely.”