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In David Cronenberg’s new body-horror romance 'Crimes of the Future', Léa Seydoux plays a performance artist who treats autopsies like theater, cutting into her lover and tattooing his organs.
, Léa Seydoux plays a performance artist who treats autopsies like theater, cutting into her lover and tattooing his organs. A mainstay in European cinema before crossing over into the blockbuster mainstream with films like, the French actor might seem out of her comfort zone in a role like that.
On the contrary: “This is exactly what I like,” she says.is sitting on the roof terrace of a hotel in Cannes during the city’s prestigious film festival. The clouds that threatened a rainstorm that morning have dissipated and passed without incident, and the sun glares against the sea. Seydoux wears oval Celine tortoiseshell sunglasses, a white T-shirt, and blue jeans. This is one of her last days here: She’s come to the festival to support both, a low-key romantic drama from art-house director Mia Hansen-Løve, which premiered the week prior. In conversation, her thoughts sprawl in such a way that she falls into deep subjects almost inadvertently. Similarly, for her role as Caprice inKristen Stewart and Léa Seydoux inThat film—which Cronenberg predicted would cause fainting and walkouts—premiered to mostly warm reviews at Cannes. It’s daring, imagining a world in which our bodies become canvases for extreme, surgery-based art and each incision invokes an orgasm. Seydoux stars alongside Viggo Mortensen, who plays her brooding partner, Saul, and, who plays a mousy assistant at an organ registry, eager to learn more about the couple. Caprice is arguably the film’s most tender and complex character: a trauma surgeon turned artist who, when confronted with the opportunity to stage the pair’s most controversial show yet, pushes back and bursts into tears. “I wanted to bring tenderness to this film,” Seydoux says, “because David’s world is harsh.” She is one of the finest plumbers of pure emotion on screen: In 2013, Seydoux won the prestigious Palme d’Or—Cannes’s top prize, usually gifted solely to a film’s director—alongside Adèle Exarchopoulos for their moving turns in, the controversial but highly praised queer drama that put Seydoux’s name on the global map. In that film, as in later projects, her tears always seemed like they came from somewhere real. “Well, cinema really saved me from my sorrow,” she concurs. “I’ve always felt like this. I had this melancholy in me as a kid, and I still carry it. It’s something that I try to do in my films—transform that melancholy into something beautiful.” She seems tired when we speak, but then again the festival is something of a circus. “Cannes is, more or less, the right balance between the superficial and deep art,” she says, a smile revealing the famous gap in her teeth. Since 2013, she’s returned for every festival except for last year’s, when she was diagnosed with the coronavirus shortly before Cannes started and missed out on four of her films’ world premieres. She’s glad to be back in the throes of it all, though. “You know, I like the superficiality,” she says, her voice so quiet you have to lean in close to hear it. “I need it because otherwise the world is too heavy.” You might assume that an actor whose directorial collaborators include some of the most renowned names in cinema—Wes Anderson, Yorgos Lanthimos, Arnaud Desplechin, Cary Joji Fukunaga, Xavier Dolan—might have a haughtier take on the vapid side of this scene. Instead, she admits to scrolling through her friend’s Instagram accounts to observe “those girls who live through it and have made a success out of it,” she says. “They created meaning out of emptiness.”Vogue
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