Léa Seydoux was a rising star when she fought off Harvey Weinstein in a Paris hotel room. The most powerful man in film tried to kiss her. “He’s fat, so I had to be forceful to resist him,” she recalled. It was thanks to such testimonies that the #MeToo movement erupted in 2017 and Weinstein’s empire of abuse collapsed.
Seven years on, I ask Seydoux if she thinks things have changed. “Yes,” she says, shocked that anyone would not agree. “You don’t feel that?”
To an extent, but there are a host of alleged wrongdoers still working, plus a backlash from some men online who think the movement went too far. Not to mention Weinstein’s 2020 rape conviction having been overturned last month on the grounds he did not get a fair trial.
“There was cinema before the #MeToo movement, and after,” she says. “And it is crazy — I have experienced both. Certain things were accepted that now seem surreal.”
She means the casting couch culture of producers being more interested in affairs than ability, but also how “the male gaze” used to be the only way that a film was made, with female talent sidelined. She mentions her two James Bond films, Spectre and No Time to Die with Daniel Craig, which turned her Madeleine Swann into 007’s equal. “It would’ve been weird to do Bond nowadays with a guy who is super-misogynistic,” she says. “It has to reflect the society we’re living in.”
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However, I say, what about France? Various rumblings of sexual misconduct threatened to overshadow the Cannes Film Festival in the past fortnight, and Seydoux, 38, has a unique perspective — few actresses are better placed to comment, having worked in both France and Hollywood, with the directors Ridley Scott, Sam Mendes, Wes Anderson, David Cronenberg, Quentin Tarantino. This year she appeared in Dune: Part Two — the most successful film of 2024 so far — while next week there’s the release of her acclaimed knotty Euro arthouse drama The Beast, by the director Bertrand Bonello.
Surely, I say, she is aware of the perception from abroad that the French do not really care about #MeToo? “That in France it never happened?” Yes — earlier this month actresses including Juliette Binoche signed a letter claiming France is “enormously backward” with #MeToo.
“No, [#MeToo] is in France as well,” Seydoux says. “The young generation is very active. I see my nieces, they are super-aware. It’s super-strong and not only in cinema. Maybe the old generation are not completely into it, but there is a change. A move has been made.”
I say part of the reason people think France is behind the curve is when President Macron says the country is “proud” of Gérard Depardieu, who has myriad charges of sexual assault against him. (The president has, since, slightly retracted his comment from last year, saying he’s waiting for Depardieu’s trial in October.)
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“So strange,” Seydoux says about Macron’s initial statement. “It was crazy. It gives a very bad image of our country. Why say that? It was really something. It’s crazy he said that — the president. Crazy. But [with #MeToo] I’m talking about the young people I see here. And they are completely aware.”
She is a straight-talker then, but with an understated and fun manner that feels less bullish, more withering, her expression locked in the near-permanent Gallic shrug. We have met in Paris, in a gorgeous little trinket-filled restaurant near where she lives with her partner, the investment banker André Meyer, and their seven-year-old son, Georges. Seydoux is dressed down in a casual big jumper and big trousers, a world and make-over away from her red-carpet Cannes display wearing Louis Vuitton a couple of weeks ago.
Appearance aside, though, she is very much like you know her on screen. As the complex Madeleine in Spectre and No Time to Die, or the besotted Emma in Blue Is the Warmest Colour, the notorious three-hour raunchy French lesbian epic. In both films she exerts power without much effort — in movies insouciance and beauty can go a long way, and Seydoux can do both.
Seydoux is in her element in The Beast, and it’s a beast to explain. She plays Gabrielle, who lives in a future where AI has taken over and people have their DNA purified to get rid of emotions. And then it gets complicated — Gabrielle meets Louis (George McKay) and thinks she knows him, which leads the film off into three timelines — 1910, 2014 and 2044 — and a lot of detours, including a terrific staging of an apocalyptically flooded Paris.
How would Seydoux sum it up? “It’s complicated,” she says with a smile. “But, for me, it’s about the fear of love.” An answer as elliptical as the film, but the plot is like that — it questions whether emotional pain is ever worthwhile, or if it would be better if we were robotic. “Sometimes,” Seydoux says softly, “I wish that I were less worried about things. I feel everything is a struggle, living is a struggle. But, then, anguish can help. Sometimes anxiety can be a survival instinct and you surpass your fear and transform it into something creative. You transcend your fears.”
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Just when it feels suitable for me to dust off some A-level Jean-Paul Sartre, Seydoux instead mentions the French surrealist poet Louis Aragon. “There is a line I love: ‘Le temps d’apprendre à vivre, il est déjà trop tard.’ Beautiful.” She scribbles it in my notebook (I should eBay that), and it roughly translates as: “By the time we learn to live, it’s already too late.”
I ask if age, family and shifting priorities made her more relaxed. “Oui. Maybe … and I learnt to make fun of myself. I don’t take myself too seriously.” Would she describe herself as an optimist, or a catastrophist? “I try to be an optimist, but …” She drifts off and looks towards the street. “I desperately try to be an optimist,” she says, laughing.
Seydoux was born Léa Hélène Seydoux-Fornier de Clausonne, into a family with an aristocratic past and heft in the film industry. Her grandfather Jérôme is the chairman of the production company Pathé. Her parents, the businessman Henri and the actress/philanthropist Valérie, divorced when she was three and she felt lonely as a child, often spending her summers being carted around Africa or America for work or summer camps.
When she turned 18 she decided to become an actress, shelving plans to be an opera singer, and success came fast. She won a newcomer award at Cannes in 2008 and starred in the gripping opening scene of Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds a year later.
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Then, in 2013, came Blue Is the Warmest Colour — the tale of a passionate sapphic fling between Seydoux’s Emma and Adele (Adèle Exarchopoulos). One of the sex scenes lasted eight minutes and left nothing to the imagination, and for years Seydoux and Exarchopoulos were involved in a war of words with the director Abdellatif Kechiche over his methods, which led to Seydoux calling him a “manipulator” who lacked respect, before adding she has “no problem” with the film — just the way Kechiche made it.
It is not a topic that she wants to dive into again, but knows it was a turning point. “I was nervous though, because of the explicit scenes,” she recalls of the premiere in Cannes. “I was young and didn’t know if it was going to be a huge flop, the end of my career.” Instead the film and its leads won the Palme d’Or, awarded by a jury led by Steven Spielberg. “And, of course,” Seydoux says with a grin, “after a Palme d’Or everything changes.”
She has a Hollywood CV anybody would envy. But that is not to say that she likes Hollywood. “You have to serve the industry over there,” she scoffs. “It’s more business and, of course, American independent cinema is at …” She drops her hand to indicate rock bottom. “And I need independent cinema — the auteurs. I really need it.”
I assume, then, that a role like her willowy, cultish seductress Lady Margot Fenring in a blockbuster like Dune: Part Two was just for the money. “Ah, but [the director] Denis Villeneuve is an auteur. And Canadian.”
When it comes to the subject of America, Seydoux could not be any more French — “Yes,” she says, laughing, “the French are very condescending” — as she pours scorn on a country where she seems to spend half her career. “You have to enhance everything in the States. Everything has to be heightened. It’s a whole way of thinking that is different to here in Europe.”
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She pauses, before wandering off on a slight tangent. “Maybe because it’s a young country? So people want to stay young for ever? It’s a society that is infantilising and you cannot get older in America, you know? It’s almost like a disease there, getting older.”
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Just for women, or for men too? “It’s the same for men,” she says. “It’s part of their culture. In America you are always infantilised. From the adverts you see in the streets to the writing they put on their cereal packets.” She shrugs, rolls her eyes, then smiles. “I feel lucky to be a European actress.”
You can see why. The Beast received rave reviews at the Venice Film Festival last year. It is bold, vibrant cinema, like an even odder Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, that deserves attention and has a sense of its own absurdity. The opening scene is of a film in a film, Gabrielle acting in front of green screen — something Seydoux is not a fan of. “It’s horrible!” she says with a gasp about the special effects technique. “A terrible experience.” I say it always looks ridiculous. “Of course it’s ridiculous,” she says. “But acting is ridiculous.”
The Beast is in cinemas from Friday
Léa Seydoux and her star directors
Quentin Tarantino
Despite little screen time, the actress made an impact as a brave farm girl in the director’s audacious war movie Inglourious Basterds (2009, Prime Video).
Abdellatif Kechiche
A critical darling when it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2013, Blue Is the Warmest Colour (2013, Prime Video/Curzon) is a three-hour lesbian love story starring Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos. It became embroiled in controversy when claims were made about the conditions on set.
Wes Anderson
The actress has collaborated with the offbeat director on two occasions: first in a small part in The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014, Disney+) and then as a prison guard who becomes a muse for an inmate in The French Dispatch (2021, Disney+).
Ridley Scott
The British film director and Russell Crowe breathed new life into a legend with the gritty Robin Hood (2010, buy/rent), in which Seydoux played Isabella of Angoulême.
Sam Mendes and Cary Joji Fukunaga
No Bond girl had played a significant role in more than one James Bond movie until Seydoux. She starred as the enigmatic psychologist Madeleine Swann twice: in Spectre (2015, buy/rent) and Daniel Craig’s final film as 007, No Time to Die (2021, buy/rent).
Yorgos Lanthimos
Before the Greek director gave us the Oscar-winning Poor Things, there was the surrealist film The Lobster (2015, buy/rent). Seydoux plays the leader of a society of loners living in the woods.
Mia Hansen-Love
In One Fine Morning (2022, Mubi), the actress shines as a widowed single mother caught between her ailing father and a new romance.
David Cronenberg
The body horror auteur directed the actress in Crimes of the Future (2022, Now/Sky), a dystopian parable about a celebrity performance artist who pulls genetically modified organs from his ribcage.
Denis Villeneuve
The director expanded his extraordinary sci-fi world by adding Seydoux to the starry cast of Dune: Part Two (2024, buy/rent) to play Lady Margot Fenring. She shares a particularly tense scene with Austin Butler.
What is your favourite performance by Léa Seydoux? Let us know in the comments below
