French actor Léa Seydoux is making her mark in Hollywood, all while maintaining a diverse filmography and humble approach
By James Mottram
IN A SUITE in Paris’ Hotel du Collectionneur, Léa Seydoux is quietly unpacking her extraordinary career. Since bursting onto screens well over a decade ago, this talented, elegant actor has graced everything from Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel and The French Dispatch to James Bond films Spectre and No Time to Die, playing Madeleine Swann, the woman who captured the heart of Daniel Craig’s 007. “I feel very happy,” she shrugs. “I just go with the flow.” If this sounds laissez-faire, Seydoux is not someone who takes her position of privilege for granted. “I have to pinch myself,” she admits.
It’s an understandable sentiment. While many French stars don’t conquer the international film circuit, the 37-year-old Seydoux is a rare exception. Even before her international breakthrough, 2013’s intense same-sex love story Blue Is the Warmest Colour, she’d landed small roles for big directors like Quentin Tarantino (Inglourious Basterds), Ridley Scott (Robin Hood) and Woody Allen (Midnight in Paris). She even featured opposite Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol, the megastar requesting her personally and casting her without an audition.
As much as she loves the Hollywood movies she’s done—and she’s increasingly doing more of them—she has her eye on conquering world cinema. “I see the cinema as a global language, and we have different dialects,” she says, reeling off a list of directors—Austrian, Israeli, Tajik—that she’s worked with in the past. “It has no boundaries. And I want to be able to explore every kind of movie in a way. And this is what I love. I mean, I love to adapt myself. I feel that I’m a bit like a chameleon. I like to transform myself.”
Just occasionally, though, she hides in plain sight. We’re here to talk about One Fine Morning, Seydoux’s latest, a film that’s somehow both devastating and uplifting in the same breath. She plays Sandra, a translator and single mother whose father, a former philosophy professor, has been stricken by Benson’s syndrome, a rare and cruel condition caused by Alzheimer’s. As brutal as this is for Sandra to see, at the same time, she falls in love with an old friend (Melvil Poupaud), giving her joy at this most terrible of times.
Sandra’s commonplace nature, dealing with everyday vicissitudes of life, was part of the appeal for Seydoux. “It’s true that it’s the first time that I that I’ve played someone who’s normal! A
