Profile: Léa Seydoux

BY: Howard Karren

As the blue-haired Emma, a Paris art student in Blue Is the Warmest Color, Léa Seydoux is as cool as they come. She’s eyed by a teenage girl, played by Adèle Exarchopoulos, who falls instantly in love with her, and their passionate love affair, charted in the movie for three hours in achingly intimate detail, inalterably changes both of their lives. When the movie premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2013, it won the Palme d’or for Seydoux; and for her costar, Exarchopoulos; and for director Abdellatif Kechiche—an unusual choice by the jury, since the Palme d’or—the top prize at Cannes—normally goes only to the filmmaker and not to the performers. But in a movie told mostly in close-up, each revealing stirrings of pleasure and hurt in the relationship—a film filled with more sex than dialogue—the contribution of the actresses to the final product was immeasurable.

For Seydoux, the months-long, isolating shoot was an enormous challenge, with Kechiche sometimes insisting on hundreds of takes for scenes taking weeks to film. And although she’s proud of her work, Seydoux has said she would never want to duplicate the experience. “I would love to do another film that requires all my being,” she told Esquire. “But with Kechiche, no. I wouldn’t work with him again. He absorbs you. Totally, like: wooosh. He vacuum-cleaned. Because he’s so demanding. The problem was not the fact that he pushed me. When you’re an actress, clearly you want to see your limits. The problem was more between the takes. The fact that you don’t see your friends, that you have no life. That was difficult.”

 
With that credit behind her, Seydoux has been enjoying new opportunities: she joined the eccentric ensemble in Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel; played Belle in a new French version of Beauty and the Beast; and got to be the latest Bond girl, one Dr. Madeleine Swann, in Spectre, winning the heart of Daniel Craig. This spring, she played opposite Colin Farrell in The Lobster, an offbeat romance. And this summer she is starring in Diary of a Chambermaid, the tale of a servant at a turn-of-the-century French provincial estate (based on a novel by Octave Mirbeau) that was previously adapted by such celebrated directors as Jean Renoir (in 1946, with Paulette Goddard) and Luis Buñuel (in 1964, with Jeanne Moreau). This new Diary is from filmmaker Benoit Jacquot, who worked with Seydoux on the 2012 film Farewell, My Queen, in which she played an attendant to Marie Antoinette who loves her royal mistress beyond the call of duty. Jacquot wrote his version of Diary with Seydoux in mind for the central role of Célestine. “I actually entrusted her with the film,” he says.

And Seydoux, in turn, was thoroughly intrigued with her character, who is forced to take a position in an abusive household. “She’s a pragmatist, who’s always trying to survive,” the actress explains. “She won’t let herself be defeated. If she has to accept a job in the provinces, so be it. Célestine is not into playing the victim—she has a certain pride and even a certain snobbishness. And a certain culture, too. She sees through appearances, and she detects the pettiness and foibles of the people around her, but she’s no better than the rest. This is not about a nice girl and evil people. Her employers exploit her, but she is at times able to exploit them back. Her condition has toughened her. She is the mirror of the ambient brutality and has no other choice but to apply it herself.”

 
In her own life, the 30-year-old Seydoux is far more shy and vulnerable than she appears onscreen. She grew up in Paris, one of seven siblings in a strict Protestant household, and her parents, who divorced when she was young, are both descended from the storied Alsatian Schlumberger family (her grandfather and grand-uncle are heads of French movie studios—Pathé and Gaumont, respectively). She was sent to summer camp in the United States, where she became fluent in English, and as a teenager she worked as a model. Seydoux claims that her family had nothing to do with her career, and that she decided to pursue acting as an adult, nabbing roles in American films in her 20s: Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds in 2009; Robin Hood in 2010; Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris in 2011; and that same year, Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol, as the assassin Sabine Moreau. “I love being in the States,” Seydoux told Esquire, “because there’s an emphasis on work. People are enthusiastic. They put heart into things. It’s enjoyable. There’s not so much melancholia and mystery, as there is in France: Everything must be understood. Everything must be analyzed. I’ve always felt that Americans are very in the moment.”