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Léa Seydoux: 'I have got lighter as I’ve got older'
She is the darling of independent French cinema who’s also been a Bond girl. On the eve of her latest film – and as she becomes a mother for the first time – she tells Will Lawrence how she balances her crippling anxiety with an exhibitionist streak
Acold and overcast day in London suddenly feels a little warmer thanks to an impromptu interlude from Léa Seydoux. The French actor, who is heavily pregnant when we meet, has just broken into song, filling the room with lyrics from Down Here I’ve Done My Best by American gospel group Take 6. There’s no R&B swagger in her version, mind you – she whispers the words rather than belts them out – but she feels that their content is apt. “The guy who is singing,” she tells me once she’s finished her recital, “he is saying that he’s done his best and right now he has no regrets. I feel like that now. I don’t feel like a victim and I like that.”
The Paris-born actor is happy at last. She might be hugely successful on screen – in Bond and Mission Impossible as well as being a star in France – but an ennui, fostered during childhood, has cast a long shadow. Now, at 31 and on the cusp of parenthood, she has emerged into the light. “I have got lighter as I’ve got older,” she says. “I know you have to enjoy the moment. I feel I have no frustrations any more. I have done my best so far. As a young girl I didn’t know what I wanted or what I was able to do. Now I feel more confident and that helps me feel better in my skin.”
We’re sitting in a Soho hotel and our conversation has dived into the deep end earlier than I’d anticipated, though this is perhaps typical of Seydoux. Even with her newfound sunny disposition, anxiety bubbles under the surface. She is, it seems, a bundle of contradictions. She claims to be incredibly shy, but also “a little bit of an exhibitionist”. She often speaks in short sentences and yet is candid about her anxieties, regularly breaking into her warm, gap-toothed smile, occasionally erupting into fits of giggles, before suddenly trailing off, dreamily.
Today, she looks every inch the epitome of Parisian style in a red Louis Vuitton dress and flowing overcoat, though she undercuts the chic with regular sniffles and nose parping (she has a cold). The Take 6 lyrics popped into her head when I asked about her pregnancy. “I always knew I wanted to have a baby,” she says. Seydoux has been with boyfriend André Meyer for three years. “I’ve always dreamed of being a mother,” she adds. “But I am happy it came now because before I think I was not ready. I would have loved to have had kids when I was young, but I think I was too dark.”
Seydoux is one of seven children. Her mother had three, the eldest of whom is 16 years older than Léa, before having another two (Seydoux and older sister Camille, a stylist with whom she worked for a while) when she married her father. Her parents divorced when she was three, and her father had two more children with his next wife.
Other children, she says, thought she was weird. “I looked like a boy. I had very short hair. I had lice so I had to cut my hair all the time. My sister, I think, wanted to have a brother, so she dressed me like a boy. I was sad.”
She was a creative child, though, and harboured dreams of singing. Opera was her ambition. “I don’t have an amazing voice, though it makes me feel free.” Only as an adult did acting appear on the horizon. The story goes that she was besotted with a French actor (whose name she will not reveal), though when she finally met him she was appalled by his arrogance. He kept forgetting her name. “Right,” she thought, “I’ll show you.”
Despite the unlikely motivation the move paid dividends, Seydoux proving both industrious and versatile, her myriad talents working on a clutch of English-language directors. Quentin Tarantino cast her in Inglourious Basterds; Ridley Scott gave her three scenes in Robin Hood, and Wes Anderson, after working with her on a short film for Prada, invited her for a three-day cameo on The Grand Budapest Hotel. And then there is Woody Allen who, beguiled by her photographs, chose her for Midnight in Paris after a short phone call, during which he asked just two questions. “Could I travel straight away and how long is my hair,” she recalls.
The shyness she felt in childhood lingered, she concedes, and she was too nervous to really relish her work with Tarantino and Scott, “and I was too scared to talk much to Russell Crowe,” but Anderson and Allen, well, they’re just her “tasse de thé”. Not surprisingly, she likes Allen’s anxiety and his ability to turn desperation into comedy. “I love that he finds humour in the fact that life is so tragic.”
Her most high-profile outings have come courtesy of Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, where franchise star Tom Cruise requested her specifically, casting her without an audition after allegedly developing a crush on her. She won’t be drawn on working with him except to say: “He has a strong presence. He has a natural authority, and he can do anything. And it is his franchise…”; and then her turn as Dr Madeleine Swann in Spectre. The Bond film, she says, has proved her favourite film experience thus far: “Because Sam Mendes and Daniel Craig were so accessible, and so kind.”
Back home in France, her star is positively incandescent. She first arrived on the screen in 2009, winning the award for best newcomer at Cannes with La Belle Personne. Critical acclaim followed for the likes of Rebecca Zlotowski’s Belle Épine, the period drama Les Adieux à la Reine and Ursula Meier’s L’Enfant d’en haut, which scooped the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. The director of Cannes, Thierry Frémaux, famously described her as “Bardot, plus Binoche, plus Kate Moss, and sometimes all three at once.”
It was Frémaux’s festival that helped solidify her iconic status in France, granting the Palme d’Or to her 2013 film Blue is the Warmest Colour. It was the first time the award was granted to the actors as well as the director. For all the plaudits, the experience was a mixed blessing with Seydoux and co-star Adèle Exarchopoulos’s fractious relationship with writer-director Abdellatif Kechiche passing into film folklore. When it comes to her craft, Seydoux knows her mind. “Some actors say they have to become the character,” she says. “But I never have to become the character. I am the character.”
She cites a moment in her latest film, the ensemble piece It’s Only the End of the World from director Xavier Dolan, in which she stars alongside French acting royalty – Vincent Cassel, Marion Cotillard, Gaspard Ulliel, and Nathalie Baye. It is adapted from the play of the same name by Jean-Luc Lagarce.
“On the set there was a moment with Xavier where we didn’t have the same vision for a scene,” she says, remembering a moment when her character smokes weed in her bedroom. “He felt I didn’t understand my character. I said: ‘No, it’s you that doesn’t understand her. I completely understand her.’” Seydoux got her way. “When I hear “Action!” I become this character. It’s not fabrication. She lives in me.”
She plays Suzanne, the sister of a young man (Ulliel) who returns home to tell his family of his impending death. Resentment and familial feuds, however, rise to the surface and derail his plans. “I had a lot of empathy for the film and for my character. Suzanne is part of me and is another version of me in a way.” Suzanne is plagued by childhood anxiety, the flames of which are fanned by her family. “I really do feel like I am her, though I feel that with all my characters.”
Filmmaking is in Seydoux’s blood. Her grandfather is co-chairman of Pathé and her grand-uncle manages Gaumont, these bastions of cinema standing as two of the oldest film companies in the world. Another grand-uncle, Michel Seydoux, produced Cyrano de Bergerac, starring Gérard Depardieu. Her mother, Valérie Schlumberger, is often described as a former actor, though she appeared in just one well-known picture, director Maurice Pialat plucking her from the costume department on 1983’s A Nos Amours and placing her on screen.
“My mother is in this iconic film, but she never wanted to be an actress. Acting is not in our family,” says Seydoux. “And my father, maybe because his father is in cinema, it is not his thing. He is more into technology. He makes headphones.” The truth is slightly grander. He is CEO of French electrical giant Parrot. “He is like a geek with his glasses and his passion for computers,” she chuckles.
Seydoux maintains that despite the deep-rooted connections to her industry, her family has paid little attention to her career. “My mother, I don’t think she realised I was doing this job until recently.” She recalls heading out to Canada for what at the time was a watershed moment. “My mum called me and said: ‘Oh, what are you doing now?’ I said I was packing to go to Canada to shoot Mission: Impossible.’ She paused for a moment and said: ‘Oh, OK, and when do you come back?’” The story sends her into fits of laughter. “My mother is definitely in her own world. She has a special personality.” Seydoux pauses again, searching for the right word. “She is… uncommon. Like me, she is a dreamer.”
And Seydoux is a dreamer still. “Actually, I had this crazy dream last night,” she says. “I was flying in the sky and I was singing. It was a beautiful voice I had in my dream.” Another bout of giggles ensues. “I don’t know what it means. Do you?” I don’t, though I note, somewhat tritely, that she is flying high in real life, too – in April she will go back to work, starring with Ewan McGregor in the offbeat love story Zoe. She also has a good voice, I tell her. “Thank you,” she says as she clears her throat. The Take 6 lyrics once more fill the room.
It’s Only the End of the World is in cinemas and Curzon Home Cinema from 24 February
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