[1] Macaigne was raised in Paris, the son of a French businessman and an Iranian-born painter.

Throughout the 2000s, he acted in several theatre productions and also wrote and staged a number of plays.

[2] He suffered two strokes at just thirty years old, one of which occurred after his 2009 staging of the theatrical adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Idiot.

His directorial feature film debut, Dom Juan, is an adaptation of the play of the same name by Molière.

It was screened in the Cineasts of the Present section at the 2015 Locarno International Film Festival.