L'agent provocateur: meet Léa Seydoux, star of Blue is the Warmest Colour

Before the controversial and widely acclaimed film Blue is the Warmest Colour, Léa Seydoux was the anxious, melancholic scion of a French film dynasty, too scared even to travel by plane. But after a role that pushed her to the edge and beyond, the actress has found love, faced her fears and is ready to soar

Hermione Eyre
31 January 2014

W

hen Léa Seydoux created one of the most desirable gay women in cinematic history in Blue is the Warmest Colour, the French love story that ran away with the Palme d’Or at Cannes last year, there was hope, in some quarters, that she might be living the lesbian dream off-screen as well as on. The 28-year-old actress told me that she questioned her sexuality while making the film, which included a seven-minute sex scene: ‘Of course I did. Me as a person, as a human being…’ There are frequently little philosophical touches to her speech; she is French, after all. ‘It’s not nothing, making those scenes. Of course I question myself. But…’ Her mobile, screen-goddess features lighten as she finds the right word: ‘I did not have any revelations.’

Soon after, it slips out: the personal pronoun. She’s in a relationship, she says, stirring her espresso like she means it. ‘It’s great,’ she says. ‘He’s great…’

A bit of a blow for a certain segment of her fan base, but Seydoux is a phenomenon that keeps on growing. Le Monde has compared her to Deneuve and ‘Adjani première période’, calling her tomboyish style ‘gavroche sexy, nonchalante et rebelle’. She has starred in a collaboration between Wes Anderson and Prada, and has a cameo in his forthcoming film The Grand Budapest Hotel. She has become Hollywood’s go-to Gallic girl, with cameos in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood and Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, not to mention a part in the altogether less cool Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol. She has been nominated for this year’s EE Rising Star Award. One of her rival nominees is 12 Years A Slave’s Lupita Nyong’o, whom she praises. ‘I’m very excited, very proud,’ she says. ‘It’s my first time at the Baftas.’

I meet her at a friendly local café in the 10th arrondissement. She comes here a lot, says the barman proudly. She arrives ten minutes late, whispering apologies, wearing a Prada coat over a boyish sweater and 1990s jeans. Her hair is wet, she wears no jewellery and her pale face is completely unvarnished: not the interview cliché of ‘no make-up’, but actually, truly, no make-up. She looks slightly albino and about 15 years old. She does not look like the winner of the Palme d’Or. The only giveaway is her vintage designer handbag, with a script poking out of the top, but even that she carries so discreetly that I don’t notice it until the end of the interview. ‘No one knows who I am,’ she says with satisfaction, squinting in the sunlight as we take our coffee outside. She can stop photographers dead on the red carpet, or she can blend into a side street. She likes being a chameleon. ‘I can transform. I know how to show myself, and how to hide myself.’

It all depends what mood she’s in, she says. Sometimes, in front of the camera, she’s very comfortable. Sometimes she feels the camera is absorbing her soul. ‘I’m the same with people. Sometimes I’m very scared of them because I feel totally transparent.’ She breaks off. ‘You’re like my psychoanalyste. Is this because I have a problem with my parents? Yes, I do,’ she says, playing it for laughs, comical and tortured all at once, like a French Woody Allen: ‘I do!’

I love her candour, but how did we get here so fast? Usually it takes a good three or four minutes before actors start analysing themselves. Let’s start at the beginning: Parisian born and bred, she is one of seven children in a complicated, divorced, privileged family, made up of two Protestant French dynasties, the Schlumbergers and the Seydoux.

Read more about Blue is the Warmest Colour

‘I had a big family, but I felt lost in the crowd,’ she says slowly, as if she’s still working out what happened. ‘I was very lonely as a kid. Really I always had the feeling I was an orphan.’ She and her elder sister Camille were close; Camille is now a stylist who dresses her and Bérénice Bejo, star of The Artist. Their mother, Valérie Schlumberger, is a former actress turned philanthropist who is passionately devoted to Senegal, importing clothing and homewares. ‘My mother was in Africa and my father was working, so he was not there. They were separated, so it was… a little chaotic.’

Her father Henri is a businessman and scion of the French film industry. Grandpère Jérôme Seydoux is the chairman of Pathé, grand-uncle Nicolas Seydoux is the head of Gaumont Film, and grand-uncle Michel Seydoux produced Depardieu’s Cyrano de Bergerac. Léa has always maintained they took no interest in her film career and haven’t helped her.

Childhood summers were spent with Christian Louboutin, her father’s best friend. ‘He used to come to our holiday house in Brittany, on an island called Bréhat, and draw shoes, shoes, shoes.’ He made her sister her first Louboutins when she was 14; little Léa, only 12, demanded a pair as well.

It sounds glamorous but sad, like a French version of a Wes Anderson film — Les Tenenbaums Royales. ‘When I was a child I couldn’t really understand what was happening in the world,’ she says. ‘School was very difficult. It was by watching people that I learned to understand the world.’ She also learned to fight. ‘Early on, when I was about ten, I understood that I wanted to grab my life. I had to fight for survival. It probably sounds strange to say this, when people think you come from a very bourgeois family, but it was not a classic big family, no, not at all. In some ways it was very privileged, but in other ways…’ She trails off, aware she’s coming across as a poor little rich girl. That tag was recently thrown at her by Abdellatif Kechiche, the Tunisian-French director of Blue is the Warmest Colour, during an almighty public row.

Seydoux and her co-star Adèle Exarchopoulos criticised his ‘horrible’ working methods, saying he made them feel like ‘prostitutes’ while making them spend ten days and nights filming the now notorious sex scene, wearing only prosthetic vaginas. Kechiche retaliated by attacking Seydoux’s ‘spoilt child arrogance’ — a low blow, surely, to use her background against her? ‘Yes, it’s not because I come from this family that I spoke. I feel independent, maybe that’s why I spoke. You know, I’m still very happy with this film. It was hard to film it and maybe people think I was complaining and being spoilt, but that’s not it. I just said it was hard. The truth is it was extremely hard but that’s OK. I don’t mind that it was hard. I like to be tested. Life is much harder. He’s a very honest director and I love his cinema. I really like him as a director. The way he treats us? So what!’

She’s proud that the film, destined to be a gay classic, is making political waves, banned in Idaho and set to ruffle feathers in Russia. ‘Cinema, it’s political. Myself, not so much.’ She doesn’t, for example, have an opinion on the unfolding François Hollande scandal. ‘I’m not political, except in my films.’ She enjoys living in the haute-bohemian area of Château d’Eau, with its African Queen wig shops and Pakistani food stalls. ‘It’s not too fancy here. When I go in Saint-Germain-des-Prés or the Marais everyone is looking super-fancy. I like to go to these places but not for living. I like the fact that here you have rich and poor in the same place; I think it’s important. Here I stay connected to people, to life. It’s like Paris used to be — not only for rich people.’

She has just finished filming the part of socialite Loulou de la Falaise in a biopic about Yves Saint Laurent. Her father was acquainted with the real-life Loulou, she thinks. ‘I had to become chic, yes. But it’s more like a colour in the film. It’s a very small part. It’s like the film is a puzzle and I will be one of the pieces. I prefer to be a small part in a great film.’

In previous interviews, Seydoux has come across as tense. She once nominated the dark shadows under her eyes as her favourite feature — a badge of her intellectual melancholia. She used to have panic attacks and a phobia of flying that she decided to fix on her 20th birthday, when she booked herself on to a return flight to Lyon, telling herself, ‘You can’t be a slave to your anxieties any more.’ But today she seems to have found a sunny equilibrium. To someone who knew her it would probably be immediately obvious: she’s in love. It comes out when I ask her if, given her fractured family upbringing, she believes in the institution of marriage. ‘I never believed in marriage, but now I’m in love, I think maybe. We still need to believe in things — we need discipline. I don’t believe in the religious side, but as a civil act — yes. But I don’t really care about marriage.’

You’re happy, then? ‘I’m very happy, yes. He’s not an actor, he’s not famous at all. He writes sometimes. He’s good at philosophie. We met some time ago but neither of us was free. He has a very… pure heart.’ So she’s become less melancholic these days? ‘Yeah. No. I’m still contemplative. I’m less sad, but sometimes I see the world in a very dark way still. Sometimes I feel the world is very sad. I feel like all art is fighting against death.’

EVENING STARD