In this Screen Tests interview, French actress Lea Seydoux talks about learning English at summer camp, her upcoming film Blue Is The Warmest Color, the challenge of love scenes, how sex is the universal language, and her crush on Marlon Brando in 'A Streetcar Named Desire' but NOT 'Last Tango in Paris'.
At the Cannes Film Festival, Steven Spielberg, the head of the jury, phoned Léa Seydoux, one of the stars of Blue Is the Warmest Color, and told her to attend the awards ceremony.
At 28, Seydoux is one of the most versatile young actresses in her native France. She has played a loyal courtier to Marie Antoinette in last year’s Farewell, My Queen, a reckless young mother in Sister, and the object of desire in the upcoming Beauty and the Beast, opposite Vincent Cassel.
Spielberg did not tell the actress what category she had won, but Seydoux assumed that she and her co-star Adèle Exarchopoulos would receive the best actress prize. “Instead, we won the Palme d’Or!” Seydoux told me in June.
Blue Is the Warmest Color had ignited her career in America. The film, based on a graphic novel by Julie Maroh, tells the story of a young girl (Exarchopoulos) who falls in love with a punky blue-haired artist, played by Seydoux, has been divisive in more ways than one. The onscreen sexual encounters are very long, intense, and more in keeping with a male heterosexual perspective than a homosexual point of view. Maroh, who is openly gay, has decried them as “uninformed, unconvincing, and pornographic.”
Taking on Blue Is the Warmest Color was a typically bold move for Seydoux, who was born into Gallic cinema royalty. Her grandfather Jérôme Seydoux is the CEO of Pathé, the French TV and movie giant; her great-uncle Nicolas Seydoux is the president of Gaumont, one of France’s largest film companies. Léa, who has been in more than 20 films and on the cover of nearly every French magazine, recently became the face of Prada’s Candy fragrance.
In the United States, if she is known at all, it is for a small part in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, or as the foreign killer out to assassinate Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible-Ghost Protocol in 2011. But her profile is about to change dramatically-sex has a way of drawing a crowd.
In that film, I noticed that you were at ease with your body. Still, does it make you uncomfortable to do nude scenes? Or sex scenes?
I like the difficulty of nudity sometimes. In love scenes, there is usually no dialogue-it’s almost like choreography. And sex is a universal language; everyone understands sex.
You recently said that the sex scenes in Blue Is the Warmest Color were “simulated” but that the “protection” was “small” and that it didn’t really alter the intimacy of the scenes. What did you mean?
We had fake p*ssies. The scenes are very sexual, but you don’t see our intimate parts. You do see a lot [she laughs], but only the other actress’s pussy shows, and it’s only for a moment.
Even so, the scenes are quite graphic.
Abdellatif Kechiche, the director, wanted them to be very sexual. When we met to discuss the movie, he asked me to spend one year with him. I had to tell him everything about my life, and we shot seven days a week for six months. One scene could last three days-he doesn’t want you to “act”: He’s looking for real feelings.
Are you a fan of American films? Do you have a cinematic crush?
Johnny Depp! In Cry-Baby, directed by John Waters. And Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire.
Not Brando in Last Tango in Paris?
No! No butter in the ass-it’s too much!
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Lea Seydoux on Blue is the Warmest Color, Love Scenes, and Marlon Brando | Screen Tests | W magazine
5 сен 2024
