Actor Vincent Cassel is about to dominate huge and small screens this 12 months, showing in two blockbuster French movies and a brand new spy thriller on Apple TV.
“Liaison” pairs Cassel with one other main French export, Eva Green, as former lovers compelled to work collectively to cease a collection of main cyberattacks.
The 56-year-old star of “Black Swan” isn’t coy about why he selected to work with the tech big. “It’s very simple. There are not many opportunities for a French actor to get an international audience,” he advised AFP.
“The power of a company like Apple is that they can press a button and 150 million people know about it. It isn’t negligible,” he added with a smile.
Cassel is already a giant title internationally, after all, thanks largely to 2 landmark French movies the place he deployed his scary power to the hilt — 1995’s gritty city story “La Haine” and 2002’s notorious rape drama “Irreversible”.
They catapulted him to Hollywood, the place he has starred within the 2014 remake of “Beauty and the Beast”, and had celebrated supporting roles in “Black Swan”, “Jason Bourne” and “Ocean’s Twelve” — in addition to a significant half within the third season of “Westworld”.
But 2023 is particular, along with his face throughout French billboards as a part of two homegrown blockbusters: “The Three Musketeers” (as Athos) and “Asterix and Obelix: The Middle Kingdom” (taking part in Julius Caesar).
“When we choose to do this for a living, it can all stop from one day to the next, but then suddenly two days later — and this has happened to me — you can find yourself in China, in Korea or Hollywood. Everything is possible,” he stated.
Cassel stated he was over the moon to have an prolonged partnership with Green, his co-star in each “Liaison” and “The Three Musketeers”.
“Eva is a really unique actress with a very instinctive side,” he stated. “I had the impression of her as a female version of the type of actor I can be. So we immediately had this electricity between us.”
More is within the pipeline — not least the intriguing prospect of Cassel taking part in a model of David Cronenberg within the Canadian director’s semi-autobiographical movie “The Shrouds”.
He can also be as a result of star in a biopic of famed French aviator and writer of “The Little Prince”, Antoine de Saint-Exupery.
Cassel likes to maintain issues shifting ahead.
“I don’t have a rearview mirror really,” he stated. “I’m incapable of comprehending what I’ve achieved and it would not actually curiosity me.
“In any case, I have more and more trouble staying in front of a screen so I’m not a big consumer of cinema or series. More and more I realize that I’m concentrating on what matters most to me — my mental health, my physical health, my family, my children, my wife, my friends — and possibly the upcoming projects because they are the most interesting.”
He makes little distinction between movie and TV, not least as a result of the budgets are not distinguishable.
“It was around $8-10 million per episode (for ‘Liaison’),” he stated. “I can guarantee you I’ve achieved movies that had been a million for the entire thing.
“Cinema will be obliged to renew itself and find the means to continue to exist. But it won’t be replaced by TV because the cinematic experience is different — it’s an experience we share, while often with TV we’re alone with our screen as we are so often these days, obsessed with these little things that make us lower our heads.”
© 2023 AFP