Unlocked: Adrien Toyon in ‘North Stars’

Before modern navigation instruments, Polaris, aka the North Star, served as a rudimentary compass for sailors. Its consistent position in the night sky made it the most reliable way to determine direction.

When someone is referred to as another person’s North Star, it usually means they’re a metaphorical compass, offering guidance, balance, stability, and support.

Defying astronomical conventions, Yentl Touboul’s moving portrait of Adrien Toyon borrows its name from the North Star, pluralizing it to reflect how Adrien finds direction through a close-knit group of friends and family within his orbit.

Born in Lebanon, where his father worked as a lifeguard, Adrien’s connection to saltwater began before he moved to Réunion Island with his mother at the age of four. “I started surfing there when I was around nine,” he recalls.

Much like constellations are formed by connecting stars with imaginary lines, Adrien’s friendship with Lee-Ann Curren took shape after he moved to France in his teens to pursue a professional surfing career. Lee-Ann, who contributed significantly to the film’s soundtrack through Malentendu, her musical project with Maïa Ibar, became a pivotal part of his personal history.

Assuming that Adrien was the photographer behind a picture of Lee-Ann, the multi-hyphenate Andrew Kidman reached out to him. “It was completely random — they had never heard of me before that,” Adrien says. A coincidental chain of events ultimately led Adrien to join the Big Sky Limited crew, with Simon Anderson and Kidman initially shaping him a thruster and a fish, respectively.

Kidman shaped him an iteration of a Skip Frye replica, similar to one he had made for Tom Curren in Litmus. Later in their relationship, Kidman admitted that, at the time, not knowing Adrien personally, he had chosen to make him a board that Tom had liked. “If Adrien Toyon doesn’t like it, then fuck him,” Kidman allegedly said. Adrien recalls: “I remember Andrew saying later, ‘Oh no, I didn’t say that.’ But I’m sure that’s what he told me.”

The fish was first tested at Saint Leu’s long, tapering walls over urchin-covered fire coral. 

Far from a plug, that board marked the beginning of a lasting relationship with Big Sky Limited and led to ongoing collaborations with shapers like Peta, with whom Adrien developed a close bond, and Dave Parmenter, who, despite never having met Adrien in person, has shaped him several boards. Identifiable by the Barry McGee dog logo and featured in the film, these hold a privileged place in Adrien’s quiver. “I’d love to meet him personally one day,” Adrien says, “because the pink board [in the movie] is probably one of my favorites.”

An axial idea for the film was to group surfers with shared affinities and geographical connections to each filming location. For Adrien, that meant returning to Réunion, a place deeply tied to his personal history. Sitting at the imaginary crux of Africa, Asia, and Europe (politically), the island’s proximity to South Africa made it a fitting and natural choice to host Mikey February and Shane Sykes. The chapter works as an escapist piece of surf travel to a location that, despite being well known, has faded from the international surf circuit due to a recent shark crisis. Somehow, it feels so novel, like a recent discovery.

Aside from party waves and swapping boards at the island’s poster wave, the group also hit La Jetée, a wave made notorious by Modern Collective and recently seen in exceptional form in Repeater. At the steep, bowly right, Mikey February stole the show, attacking it with the flair you’d expect — and perhaps the vigor you wouldn’t.

After shooting part of the session from land, Yentl took the long walk out to the jetty for a side angle. Enthralled by the action in the water, a surge of whitewash dragged his phone into the jetty’s crevices. Adrien, who had come to dry land to tend to a gash in his knee that later required multiple stitches, said of the situation: “He didn’t care about his phone; he just kept shooting.” It didn’t seem like Yentl cared about the wound either, as Adrien left to get stitched up while the filming continued.

As you type, “How likely am I to get attacked by a shark in Réunion?” into ChatGPT, Adrien will be surfing in and around his adopted home in the French Basque Country, before heading to Indonesia to meet tube youth Koldo Ilumbe, where, at Desert Point, they’ll do what extraordinary goofyfoots are meant to do.

While shaping an orange-tinted flex tail that Adrien rides in Sumbawa and Ireland in reverse chronological order, Tom Morat describes him as “open-minded and keen to try new things.” Surfboard heterogeneity runs as a common thread throughout the film, and Adrien makes peculiar board choices for locations where most would opt for something more conventional. “It’s pretty cool to be able to surf all these boards from different shapers,” he says. “I’ve been improving my surfing a lot, just from riding them.”

In keeping with the Northern Rivers (Australia) ethos of growing your own, Kidman has encouraged Adrien over the years to shape his own surfboards. Though Kidman calls him “very stubborn,” Adrien has, in fact, been listening. He learned the basics from Peta and has shaped three surfboards so far, which Yentl described as “pretty decent.”

Though they had known each other for longer, it wasn’t until three or four years ago, during a Vans trip to Ireland, that Yentl and Adrien connected more profoundly. That trip marked the beginning of what would later become North Stars — the film’s narrative is non-linear, and Ireland was actually the first of two and a half years worth of shooting trips. 

The film concludes where that relationship began. In the company of Kobe Hughes, Seb Smart, Gearóid Mcdaid, and the Irish crew, Adrien takes the Morat for its maiden journey during his first-ever session at one of the Emerald Isle’s most filmed slabs. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding, and the board became one of Adrien’s favorites — until it broke.

Among the countless anecdotes and backstories that could warrant a North Stars BTS release, our conversation ran longer than expected. Adrien had to head off to meet Morat in the shaping bay in an attempt to replicate that board.

“A 2 p.m. meeting with Tom, though, is more likely to mean 3 p.m.” — and that seemed just fine by him.