Léa Seydoux Transforms: The Cannes Icon on Her Bold Festival Return, Not Being Threatened by AI and Championing Denis Villeneuve’s Bond Movie
“I’m pregnant. Will that be OK?”
Léa Seydoux wasn’t sure if the timing was right at all. She’d been approached years prior by writer-director Arthur Harari to star in “The Unknown,” a science fiction film he was working on; Seydoux had read an intriguing but confusing first draft, then “just forgot about it,” she recalls. Now, Harari was ready to shoot, but she’d be stepping in front of the camera just barely postpartum.
“Yes,” Harari replied. “It’s even better.”
While making “The Unknown,” which premieres in competition at Cannes on May 18, Seydoux hardly recognized herself. “We shot two and a half months after I had my baby,” she says. (The child, her second with partner André Meyer, was born in December 2024.) “I was still breastfeeding, and I put on a lot of weight. I was quite heavy. I used it — it was interesting, because I was not in my body. This is what David is experiencing.”
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It served the story, because David — Seydoux’s character — doesn’t recognize himself either. Harari (an Oscar winner for co-writing “Anatomy of a Fall”) wrote Seydoux one wild part — she is, at first, an unknown woman who has a one-night stand with a photographer named David (Niels Schneider). When David wakes up, he’s still himself on the inside, but he’s trapped in his partner’s body. Seydoux tromps through the film with a masculine heaviness — a sense of dysphoria that translates to her character’s ungainly bearing. The story, based on a graphic novel co-written by Harari, might sound like an allegory of trans identity. “It made me think of that, of course,” Seydoux says, before she dug deeper. “But it’s more the question of — do I exist? It transcends the gender of a person.” David’s problem, in other words, isn’t that he is in a body of the wrong sex — it’s that he’s not sure he’s David at all.
Which rang true for Seydoux, a performer whose best-known roles summon an indomitable fierceness but who is, in conversation, thoughtful and surprisingly vulnerable. “When I was 18, I had strong panic attacks,” she tells me. “Even now, I still have strong panic attacks — and when I have a panic attack, it’s the vertigo of being yourself. I remember having a panic attack: I watched myself in the mirror, and I was like, This is me. I am myself. What I see in the mirror is actually me.”
Realizing one is locked into one’s own perspective is a terrifying experience — in part because one can never see oneself the way others do. Even as she’s been in dozens of films, from franchise fare to auteurist cinema, Seydoux still feels a sense of dissociation about her own image. “When I watch a movie with me, sometimes I’m like, Is it really me? Do I really look like this person?”
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To read through Seydoux’s list of credits is to grasp her talent for transformation — she’s an actress who pushes to the edge while becoming someone else. That’s a process she needs. A Cannes mainstay, Seydoux has become a staple of world cinema thanks in part to her refusal to be pinned down. Since her Palme d’Or-winning breakthrough in 2013 with the frankly sexual, emotionally walloping “Blue Is the Warmest Colour,” Seydoux has dabbled in the Hollywood studio system, lending style and edge to the James Bond franchise (where she played Daniel Craig’s one true pairing, the Proustianly named Madeleine Swann) and to “Dune: Part Two” (where her sly Bene Gesserit noblewoman has big plans for Austin Butler’s fearsome warrior). And directors from Yorgos Lanthimos to Wes Anderson to David Cronenberg have turned to Seydoux when they need a performer willing to try anything. (Harari cast Seydoux after seeing her playing an amoral, status-obsessed TV journalist in the loopy 2021 drama “France.”)
Seydoux’s characters across her career have little in common, although fans might see certain hallmarks: There’s a soft-spokenness that makes the listener lean in, whether she’s conveying seduction or threat. Seydoux also approaches her beauty with a quintessentially French casualness. Often, she leverages her preternatural calm, and plays against her angelic looks, to assay authority figures with a certain menace, as in the “Dune” sequel or “The Lobster,” where her rigid rebel leader turns Colin Farrell’s search for romance into a living hell.
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At this year’s Cannes Film Festival alone, she takes two competition entries in wildly different directions, appearing in Harari’s body-swap fantasia as well as the grounded, social-realist drama “Gentle Monster.” In that film, she plays a musician whose husband is accused of possessing child pornography. Either film could position her as a prime contender for an acting prize; both also announce her, at 40, as operating at the peak of her powers. But she’s curious how they’ll be received against one another. “Which one did you like the most?” Seydoux asks me in a moment of frankness. “Gentle Monster,” I say, is a very special film. But “The Unknown” blew me away.
Seydoux smiles, then nods. “‘The Unknown’ — I think it’s the best part I’ve ever played.” She’s leaning forward into her computer’s camera — she’s Zooming in from Paris — as her tone grows passionate. “It’s really this existential subject. What is it to exist? Do I exist?”
Based on our conversation, I can confirm that Seydoux does indeed exist — and that she has a probing curiosity about what she can accomplish while she’s here. Her two Cannes films lend themselves to a simple comparison: “The Unknown” uses the tools of genre to prize apart the nature of experience, while “Gentle Monster,” from Austrian director Marie Kreutzer, plays things straight. For Seydoux, the fantastical approach makes things easier. “Science fiction allows you to be even closer to human emotions. Because it’s so unrealistic, if you decide to believe in what you see, you can really immerse yourself in the human emotions.” If Cannes audiences are along for Harari’s surreal ride, they’ll find insights that stand out for just how real they are. “It’s where cinema is an art form,” Seydoux says. “With the fakeness of cinema, you can make the truth appear. When you do a realistic film like Marie’s, where it’s a believable story that could happen — it’s much more difficult.” Artistic transformation enables Seydoux to go anywhere. But in a domestic drama, she’s forced to rely on a story bound by the rules of our reality. Not that that’s holding her back. “Gentle Monster” is as tenderly observed and wrenching as “The Unknown” is transporting, and it fixes us in the perspective of Seydoux’s Lucy Weiss; we get no more information about her husband’s alleged misdeeds than she does, and sequences where Lucy must watch her child being interrogated to learn if he’s been touched inappropriately, or when she pleads with an investigator to believe in her husband’s innocence, have a gut-punch power.
But Seydoux shrugs off the question of whether she took the work home with her. “Of course I was affected,” she says. “But I really tried to be more in the present. When I’m acting, I can’t think too much. It’s absolutely awful — but the thing is, she doesn’t know. I’m not judging the story — she doesn’t want to believe it.” And so Seydoux, not getting ahead of the story, couldn’t believe the facts of the film either.
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Playing Lucy also enabled Seydoux to tap into her love for music: Lucy has sidelined a lucrative and productive career as a concert pianist and singer to care for her husband (Laurence Rupp) after he has a breakdown; a French speaker, she’s settled in Germany, where she’s less familiar with the language. (This specific plot element recalls the broken marriage of “Anatomy of a Fall.”) Seydoux, who grew up in an artistic family (her grandfather is the chairman of French media giant Pathé), once aspired to sing professionally; using her voice was a return of sorts. “When I was a young kid singing,” she says, “it was my only way of expression.” Seydoux was painfully shy, and just as a sci-fi device can transform an incomprehensible truth into something legible, she used songs to express what she could not say. Like Lucy, she spent much of her childhood in a strange land — Seydoux’s mother spent a great deal of time in Senegal, where Seydoux would visit her, and she passed summers at camp in the U.S. so she could learn English. Today, she’s grateful. “Bizarrely, I feel even more myself when I’m displaced,” she says. But in the moment, Seydoux was an isolated child and bullied in school. She eventually grew so withdrawn that she stopped singing. Which meant that performing music on film came with a lot of fear. In her public life, Seydoux relies on the distancing effect of moviemaking to conceal her real self. “When you act in films, you can hide yourself. You can transform. You have layers — the screen and the camera is a layer between you and people. But to sing — you are very vulnerable when you sing.” Seydoux worked with French singer Camille (winner of a songwriting Oscar for “Emilia Pérez”) to get the craft right, and tried to assure herself she was ready. “I will have to sing, and it’s OK,” she recalls thinking. “I think I can do it. It really defines Lucy.”
All, for Seydoux, is in service of the character — but she doesn’t know another way of working. “I give so much of myself because I’m so shy,” she says. “To act, for me, is something where I feel so exposed and so vulnerable. Then I’m like, the only way to forget about things is to throw myself. So I throw myself, and sometimes it works.”
One recent example of it working well was “The Beast,” Bertrand Bonello’s 2023 sci-fi romance, in which Seydoux appeared opposite George MacKay. (Unexpectedly for a movie featuring one of Cannes’ signature stars, this one played Venice.) Across three timelines, Seydoux inhabits the story of a woman exploring her past lives and seeking to tame her emotions; to do so will enable her to be a better cog in the economy of a future world defined by artificial intelligence.
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Back when the movie came out, I tell Seydoux, I thought about AI basically never; now, I think about it all the time. Does she believe that AI will put filmmakers out of business?
“I don’t think so,” she says. “I think that nothing can replace humanity. I don’t feel threatened. Maybe I’m wrong! But I believe in human nature.”
Like many shy people, Seydoux seems to be most at home in her own thoughts — and to speak to her is to enjoy the hairpin turn, the unexpected approach. Asked, for instance, what she thought of working with “Dune” franchise director Denis Villeneuve, Seydoux first uncorks a series of observations she’s made over the years about the general nature of French Canadians and their differences from her own countrymen. “They have this language — it’s American translated into French,” she explains to me, with a crucial difference being that Canucks do not use the word “bonjour” in the morning.
Finally approaching the question directly, Seydoux says that she loves Villeneuve and sent him a note conveying her delight when he was named the next Bond director. Seydoux had been ambivalent at best to see a franchise for which she’d recently helped close a chapter — Craig’s Bond allows himself to be sacrificed to save Madeleine and the daughter they share — getting acquired by Amazon MGM. “I was a bit sad when I heard that it was sold,” she says, “but now that it’s Denis, I was like, Oh, at least it’s him, so it will be cinema.”
Her praise for Villeneuve includes the observation that “he’s super cultured — he knows so much about cinema, but not only cinema.” Seydoux, with her curiosity about identity and her appetite for challenging roles, is the same. But she gets less cerebral, more instinctual, when she acts. On “The Unknown,” for instance, she found herself consumed by recursive thought processes. “I’ve never done any theater school. I learned to act in front of a camera,” she says. “So I feel that I’m almost an unprofessional actor. I’ve done so many films, but I’m still sometimes like I will never be able to do this.” Up until shooting began, Seydoux was in a state of dread. Then “something clicked — something that I understood about the character. And I was like, ‘OK — now I am David.’ I was completely transcended by this character — I was David, this man in this woman’s body.” Seydoux smiles. “And this is what I love about cinema.”
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Lately, she’s had more opportunities to explore that love: “Gentle Monster” and “The Unknown” represent half of a four-in-a-row run for the actress. Only weeks ago, Seydoux wrapped Charlie Polinger’s “The Masque of the Red Death,” an A24 adaptation of one of Edgar Allan Poe’s most macabre tales, about the Grim Reaper stalking a group of nobles celebrating at a masquerade ball amid a plague. Seydoux stars opposite Mikey Madison (who replaced original topliner Sydney Sweeney) and Franz Rogowski. “It was very different from ‘The Unknown’ and from Marie’s film,” she says. (One would expect nothing less.) “I’m playing a very mean lady-in-waiting. To play alongside Mikey was one of the greatest things I’ve experienced in my life. I’m really, really impressed by her talent — wow, she’s amazing. Mikey has this strength and vulnerability at the same time. She’s a very touching actress — I am rarely touched like I was with her.” Seydoux reaches for a comparison: “She reminds me a little bit, even though she’s very different, of when I worked with Adèle [Exarchopoulos] on ‘Blue Is the Warmest Colour.’ She was astonishing.”
“Blue Is the Warmest Colour” occupies complicated territory in recent Cannes history. The love story between Exarchopoulos’ high schooler and Seydoux’s sophisticated older artist was a sensation at the fest; the Steven Spielberg-led jury voted it the Palme winner unanimously. (Seydoux and Exarchopoulos shared the win with their director, Abdellatif Kechiche, in an unprecedented jury decision meant to highlight the depth of the trio’s collaboration.) In a joint interview months later, though, Seydoux described the shoot as “horrible” and Exarchopoulos described Kechiche’s directing style as “a kind of manipulation, which was hard to handle”; both said that they would not work with him again. Given that the film’s plot — and its critical success — hinged in large part on its ruthlessly direct depiction of its central couple having sex, this set off alarms.
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Time brought Seydoux some relief; perhaps, for an admitted overthinker, the heat of the film’s release was uncomfortable. “Acting alongside Adèle was really like a force of nature. She throws herself in a way that I find mesmerizing. Abdellatif is a great actor’s director. I’m an actor who’s always looking for truth. I want things to be embodied. And there was an exploration. Sometimes he was filming with three cameras, and he really let us experience things and do things and try things.” New thoughts seem to occur to Seydoux as she speaks: “This is a process that I liked. We are looking for something. And cinema is not an exact science. You’re looking for something, and then there is a grace. Grace happens. You’re looking for —” She cuts herself off. Another new thought, presented with the triumphant tone of someone comfortable rooting around in her own thoughts having found le mot juste. “We are gold diggers!”
Between the existential excavation of “The Unknown” and the human-scale angst of “Gentle Monster,” Seydoux has struck pay dirt this year. “I am very curious to see how people will receive the movies,” she says. “I make films for people — once I’ve done the movie, then it doesn’t belong to me anymore.”
The reception is an interesting object of study, but it’s not the point for Seydoux — she’s had the experience of becoming Lucy, becoming David. “When I act, it’s a selfish pleasure,” she says. “While I’m doing the film, I’m totally in it. I give everything I can to make the character believable and human.”
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It might seem as though Seydoux is saying that she wants simply to do a convincing job as an actress, but something more seems to animate her words. Why is it so important for her to transform? “Sometimes I experience the feeling of being transparent,” she tells me. The childhood anomie that caused her to stop singing is still with her. “No one sees me. No one’s paying attention to me. Am I even a real person?” Film is not the be-all and end-all for Seydoux. (Asked about her “Gentle Monster” co-star Catherine Deneuve, who plays Seydoux’s mother, the actress marvels at a half-remembered Deneuve quote about work taking a back seat to life: “The real experience of life is love,” Seydoux says in a faraway voice.) But it allows her to experience some fundamental understanding of herself — an understanding that may elude her when she’s not working. “I’m going to tell you something very intimate,” she goes on. “The reason why I do this job …” She trails off, starts again. “I never really wanted to become an actress, but I wanted to exist. The only way I found to exist was to have my image printed on a film and have the proof of my existence.” David, a lost soul searching for himself, could relate, perhaps even before he transforms: He makes his art, photographs of the world around him, as a way to communicate some essential truth. Seydoux, toggling between dreamlike drama and intimate character study, is doing the same.
“I was like, no one really cares about me.” How heartbreaking, I reply. “Yeah, but it’s true,” Seydoux says with Parisian flatness. She doesn’t want sympathy, but she needs to be understood. “In a way, acting — this is why it’s so important, and fundamental for me. I have this need to be seen.”