Film star Mathieu Amalric is the next Bond villain. But he'd really rather be behind the camera, he tells Elizabeth Day
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Mathieu Amalric is a man with an apparently limitless capacity to be profound. He does extreme thought like other people do extreme sports, so that he turns a simple question into an exercise in philosophy.
"How come I became an actor?" he muses, eyes gazing into
the mid-distance, head tilted quizzically to one side. "I was so shy. I still am afraid. I always think I'm not going to be able to do it. How can I learn these lines? How is the brain connected to the tongue? It's a miracle."
I nod. He smiles benignly, rather like, I imagine, Socrates might smile at Victoria Beckham.
Sometimes talking to Amalric can feel like being in an earnest postgraduate discussion group pondering the meaning of it all. As an actor, too, he remains an enigma. He has a semi-recognisable face but, for the past few years, has contented himself with carving out a niche in critically acclaimed, independent films in his native France.
Then last year he put in a startlingly good performance in Julian Schnabel's Oscar-nominated The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and shortly afterwards was cast as the baddie in the forthcoming Bond film starring Daniel Craig.
At 42, Amalric is teetering on the brink of global celebrity - but it is not a prospect he relishes. "I try to have a normal life," he says. "That's very important to me. Being an actor, if you only have that in your life, you would go mad immediately."
As he talks, he clutches his head in his hands, as if attempting to dig thoughts out with his dirty fingernails.
"Try to do things you're not able to do," he says at one point, apropos of not very much, and then leans back in his capacious leather armchair with an enigmatic sigh.
As an actor, Amalric is extraordinarily good at conveying a sense of great depth of thought onscreen, even at moments of extreme physical passivity. His performance as a paralysed victim of "locked-in syndrome" in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly won him a Cesar (a French film award) for best actor.
His portrayal of Jean-Dominique Bauby, the former editor of French Elle, who was left paralysed by a massive stroke in 1995 and able only to blink his left eye, was remarkable for being almost entirely static, yet conveying each subtle shade of poignancy and pain.
For an actor so defined by introspection, is the machismo of Bond not a come-down? He ponders this. "You know, when you act, you act with your body, so immediately you're not working as an intellectual. You have to be an animal. You have to be a bit stupid to be an actor, it's very important, you know, just to be ..."
Instinctive? "Yes. It's exactly like an acrobat, I spend a lot of time preparing my props. The James Bond was a continuation [of that]. This morning I was rehearsing the stunts for the fights and I love that. It's very wild, very nasty - it's great. And you know for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, I was exhausted by the end of the day. It's very physical, not moving."
He can't say much more about Quantum of Solace, the 22nd Bond film, because of the near-fanatical secrecy that surrounds the franchise. He spent weeks shooting the film in Panama in his role of Dominic Greene, an ecological campaigner turned villain.
In his preparation for the role he has thought a lot, he says, about how to be evil.
"Now that the Bonds are more realistic, you don't know who the villain is anymore - they don't have a metal jaw, they don't have a scar, they don't have an eye that bleeds.
"In this film, I don't have anything to help me be a villain; I just have my face. So maybe his weapon is his smile, like the mystery of the smile of Tony Blair."
For all his undoubted talent, Amalric is at pains to point out that he never set out to be an actor.
He was born in the wealthy Parisian suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine and his parents were both journalists on Le Monde - his mother, Nicole, was a literary critic and his father, Jacques, the foreign affairs editor.
He was never tempted to follow their lead - "Perhaps I was too pretentious" - and says he knew from the age of 17 that he wanted not to act in films, but to direct them.
A family friend recommended him to Louis Malle who was then filming Au Revoir Les Enfants and took Amalric on as a trainee assistant director in 1987.
He confesses that he was too intimidated to speak to Malle: "Shyness is a very bad thing in movies, you have to kill it - yes! You have to go take risks and you have to be unafraid of being thought ridiculous."
His most vivid memory of the shoot was running into technicians in the editing suite who were working on Roman Polanski's Frantic, which was being filmed a few streets away. He admits he was "fascinated" by Polanski at the time. He has been told that he looks like him and there is a clear resemblance - the same sleepless brown eyes, the same fluid mouth and an attractiveness that stops short of being uncomplicatedly good-looking.
But there was a family connection, too: Amalric's maternal grandparents came from the same Polish village as Polanski. They were Jewish and moved to France with Amalric's mother at the outbreak of World War II (Amalric also appears in Un Secret, a World War II drama about a Jewish family).
Amalric went on to direct a further two movies before being persuaded to accept his first major acting role, aged 30, in the cult French film Ma Vie Sexuelle.
Then, he says, he just kept being offered acting parts by "great directors" and it all got in the way of what he really wanted to do. At the moment, he has no fewer than six films in the pipeline. And then there's the one he wants to direct himself, about American burlesque dancers, which keeps getting postponed.
"I think my nightmare would be that maybe I'm just a good actor," he says, laughing gently. "But I love directing. I think about that all the time, but sometimes, maybe, you're better at something you don't care about."
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