Léa Seydoux ‘Gentle Monster’ Interview

Having appeared in both the penultimate and the final Daniel Craig-era Bond films and in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two, Léa Seydoux has entered a phase of her career where risk-taking feels paramount. “I like when acting’s a bit dangerous, I think I like to take risks,” she tells me, speaking from her home in Paris.

Seydoux, who shared the best actress prize with Adèle Exarchopoulos at Cannes for Blue is the Warmest Colour, now feels she has “more experience” as an artist. Hence perhaps her decision to take on an extremely weighty, highly-nuanced role in Marie Kreutzer‘s Gentle Monster which is playing at the Telluride Film Festival and was snapped up by Netflix during Cannes.

As Lucy, a musician who shares a nine-year-old son with her director husband Philip (Laurence Rupp), Seydoux plays out the devastating aftermath when he’s suddenly arrested for online activity in child pornography groups. Has he abused their son? How could she have missed the signs? Is it all a mistake? How can this be?

Seydoux hints that she may have sought out a part that’s “so real” because, she concedes, she herself is the mother of two sons, aged nine and 21 months. The children are ”my own personal experience, let’s say,” she tells me. In fact, I can hear her youngest child playing in the background as we talk.

“I think it’s a very interesting age, my age now,” the 41 year-old says. “I don’t like to talk about my age because I don’t want to put myself in a box,” she laughs. “Like, OK, it’s true that this age is very interesting and I feel that I understand things in their complexity more than before.”

She and Kreutzer (Corsage) had many conversations about the film’s highly-charged, sensitive subject matter. “They were about what you can imagine if you were in a similar situation,” noting that, for her, “the movie is very relevant,” with its themes of the betrayal of innocence and the shock of realizing that the man you love, your husband, the father of your young son, has betrayed a sacred trust.

What she had to imagine repelled her, but the discussions that she had with the filmmaker made her realize that she had “to make this film,” she says. “It’s a real problem in society, this problem of pedophilia and families. There was a woman who had a similar story and Marie told me about her and the fact that she spent a lot of time with her.”

Those talks with the woman Kreutzer met helped the director write the film. “It gave her ideas,” Seydoux says, “but for me, when I read the script for the first time, I was immediately touched by the subject and how also what I love is that it’s a statement.” Plus, she was compelled by Marie’s decision “to make this film, and it is important.”

She’s full of admiration, too, for Kreutzer’s “very subtle” script. “And this is what I like, because it’s so difficult to make a movie about that subject, you know, it’s full of complexity.”

Unfortunately, I do have some knowledge of this topic, due to having covered court cases earlier in my career where men, whether they be fathers, brothers, uncles or cousins have appeared in the dock for sexually abusing minors, and I seethed as the accused would attempt to wriggle their way out of the heinous charges against them. And I gained an understanding of the vital work done by the U.K.’s National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children [NSPCC].

None of this makes me a criminal expert, but I did observe women called to give evidence about what their partners did. What I saw in Seydoux’s performance, and what she captures so brilliantly, is the sense of disbelief. Initially, Lucy cannot comprehend what it is her husband might have done. Then it becomes very clear that life for her and her child has been shattered in way that can never be healed. 

That’s what I saw in Seydoux’s eyes in the film. I had witnessed such a look in real life, and now here it was in front of me on a big screen as Lucy shed fragile layers with each new revelation.

Seydoux says Kreutzer’s perspective was to hone in on Lucy, making her the “main protagonist” and it’s “through her emotions that we follow the whole thing.” Sighing, she says that sometimes her work allows her to “express something that I feel. I’m not a politician. I cannot really have an opinion and it’s not a subject that I can completely handle in a way, as it’s very, very complex, this subject.”

The situation in the film has “all these contradictions,” she says. “So the fact that she’s in love with this man, but then these horrible things are happening and all these contradictory emotions.”

When we first see Lucy, or rather hear her, she’s at her piano reinterpreting both lyrics and musical arrangements to the Mike Leeson and Peter Vale-written song “Would I Lie To You” (‘Look into my eyes, can’t you see you see they’re open wide? Would I lie to you, baby, would I lie to you?) It was a massive hit in 1992 for Charles & Eddie, but now as sung by Seydoux’s Lucy it’s steeped in unimaginable pain.

Did the director suggest that she study any material related to the topic? “It was very tacit between us,” Seydoux says. “The only thing she asked me was to work on was my German and the piano and the music” But they never really talked about how Lucy felt. “She never gave me intentions.”

Seydoux suggests that the preparations I might have imagined weren’t necessary because “when I read the script, I had an immediate empathy. It was very strong, I really felt that I knew who she was,” a feeling she calls “very rare.” Her voice breaks as she recounts the emotional impact of the experience.

 Seydoux is giving a masterclass in acting this awards season, what with both Gentle Monster and in Arthur Harari’s The Unknown. He shared an Oscar as co-writer of Anatomy of a Fall, which was directed and co-written by his wife Justine Triet.

The Unknown is an outrageously sublime movie about a photographer who sleeps with a woman (Seydoux) that he meets at a party, who then awakens to discover that he has transformed into her. I caught both pictures at Cannes and both have stayed with me. The Unknown has two further screenings Sunday at the Sheridan Opera House. Seydoux was attracted to The Unknown because it was both “philosophical and meta physical,” she says. “I like to experience intensity. So making these films, it’s a way to experience intensity.” 

Seydoux says of Gentle Monster, “I really love to be able to live inside the film,” and the trick for her is not to over analyze too much. “I was just trying to be her, to be Lucy.”

We discuss how, until laws were changed, men like novelists Gabriel Matzneff were able to go on French television and “boast” of their relationships with underage children. She remembers reading Vanessa Springora’s memoir Consent which detailed her involvement with Matzneff when she was just 14 and he was 49. “I mean, it’s really horrible what he was allowed to do,” Seydoux says. “And to then talk about this pedo pornography on the TV in a brazenly open way. And it’s just crazy when you think of this thing. Everybody was like, ‘Oh, OK,’ and he was making jokes. This horrible man was laughing about it. He seemed to make it acceptable when it’s not,” she says bitterly.

I ask her about Malo Blanchet, who plays Lucy’s son in Gentle Monster. Did he have any idea what the film was about? “Maybe not the whole thing, but I don’t know for sure,” she says. “The parents obviously knew, of course. I don’t think he really knew the story. He’s a kid, too young. I think he was protected,” she says.

However, she was able to discuss the film’s story with Catherine Deneuve who plays Lucy’s mother. “That was a dream of mine to work with her. She’s such an icon,” Seydoux says.

Following Gentle Monster and The Unknown she joined Cate Blanchett in the ridiculously wacky alien comedy Alpha Gang. She lets out a roar of laughter, “I thought it was completely crazy. I needed to do something light after those films.”

And next, she has a project she’s not allowed to talk about. “But it’s a strong story like Gentle Monster and I can’t wait,” she says.

Gentle Monster opens in select U.S. theaters on October 30th and begins streaming on Netflix on November 18th.

The film is produced by Alexander Glehr and Johanna Scherz at Film AG alongside Komplizen Film (Germany), Kazak Productions (France), Kjellson & Wik (Sweden), and Film i Väst.