Vincent Cassel: The nose is borrowed - the acting's for real

Vincent Cassel has popped up in Brit flicks, but in France he's a star

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Read My Lips: reviewed by Anthony Quinn

French cinema's current poster-boy isn't exactly at his most debonair in his latest role. With his bum-fluff moustache, lank frizzy hair, and slept-in clothes, Vincent Cassel certainly looks the crumpled part in Read My Lips as a hustling ex-con whose work placement in a property company unexpectedly prompts the settling of a gangland score. Since he burst on to the scene with La Haine in 1995, as the skinhead with a stolen police revolver burning a hole in his pocket, Cassel has been nothing if not versatile: his next film, the dazzling Hitchcockian thriller L'Appartement, cast him as an urban sophisticate negotiating a labyrinth of voyeurism and desire.

With his high cheekbones and wide-set eyes, he's not exactly textbook handsome, but that gives him the chance to flit between leading-man presence and off-kilter character parts, recently teaming up with Jean Reno in the alpine policier The Crimson Rivers then cutting loose as an addled one-armed nobleman for The Brotherhood of the Wolf, that blend of 18th-century costume drama, martial arts and monster-movie carnage.

These last two were substantial hits across the Channel last year, where the appetite for homegrown populist movies has recently begun to challenge Hollywood dominance. Add that to the critical acclaim Cassel's received for his deft, touching performance in Read My Lips (nominated for the French César award for the first time since La Haine) and the 36-year-old's stock has never been higher. Oh yes, and he's married to pulse-quickening Italian actress Monica Bellucci, his co-star in L'Appartment and several times since. And now he's in Honolulu, relaxing before his next film.

He's fizzing with admiration for Read My Lips director Jacques Audiard, who made the brilliant comedy of WW2 charlatanry A Self-Made Hero. "I don't want you to be you, Vincent, because you're much better when you're not you," were the instructions on this blend of crime-flick plotting and sly social satire, which pairs Cassel with Emmanuelle Devos as a vengeful hearing-impaired secretary. This was fine by his leading man: "I love changing myself. When I read the script I felt it could have been a part Depardieu would have played back in the Seventies, so I had his nose and Patrick Dewaere's moustache. At first we were almost bogged down in heavy realism, and it didn't quite work, so we added a little Italian comedy, a touch of Vittorio Gassman."

By now Cassel has probably earned the right to think of himself in such company, though you'd get a pretty skewed idea of him if you'd just seen the film's he made in Britain, whether cross-dressing as the Duc d'Anjou in Elizabeth, expiring in a tsunami of luminous vomit during Ade Edmondson's Guest House Paradiso, and now menacing Nicole Kidman in Russian in Jez Butterworth's forthcoming Birthday Girl. At first he offers the "I'm young and trying out lots of things" argument in defence, but dig a little deeper and there's a genuine resentment over the casting shorthand which equates foreign with exotic, if not villainous. "How come English actors always play the Germans in American films?There's something wrong about it. I want to become an international actor, but I have a problem going to Hollywood just to play the baddie." To his credit, he's walked with his feet on this one, parting company with his first big American production, The Sin Eater. The film is the follow-up to A Knight's Tale by director Brian Helgeland and star Heath Ledger, in which a priest uncovers the last survivor of a deadly religious sect. "I liked the fact the part could be ambiguous, discussed it with the director, but when they edited the first scene together they said it wasn't clear enough I was the baddie. I told them they'd chosen the wrong guy and that was it.

"To me Birthday Girl represents exactly the same problem. I only did it to act with Matthieu Kassovitz, but it was delayed for two years. I need to be able to identify with what I'm doing. Lose that and I just don't care any more." Thankfully, for his sanity at least, the younger generation of French filmmakers is offering plenty of alternatives. Cassel's a big name on home ground, but he's achieved it without going the route of the celluloid establishment, the Chabrols or Taverniers. "I started out as an actor with the attitude of fuck 'em all. I don't think I would have stuck with it, if I hadn't I met guys like Jan Kounen (Dobermann), Christophe Gans (Brotherhood of The Wolf) and Gilles Mimouni (L'Appartement). We're involved in a mission. In France, our own movies used to have, say, 12 per cent of the market, and the rest was American. Now we have 45 per cent, a huge thing, and we're one of the few countries in the world that can say that. I'm working with the people I want to work with. J'ai le cul bordé de nouilles ... 'I've got noodles round my butt'. I'm very lucky, in other words."

'Read My Lips' opens on 24 May