If Robert De Niro ever stars in a Bruce Forsyth biopic (and he must), he will look like Vincent Cassel at this moment. Over Zoom from Paris, the engaging 56-year-old French movie star grins mirthlessly and thrusts his chin forward. I’ve just reminded him that the last time we met, 20 years ago, he and his then wife, Italian model turned actor Monica Bellucci, were scandalising the Cannes film festival with Gaspar Noé’s Irréversible, in which his character’s friend sickeningly clubs the man, who he thinks raped his wife, to death with a fire extinguisher.
“That was a different era,” Cassel says amiably as if channelling Brucie, then modulates into De Niro’s Travis Bickle. “I was violent and angry. Now I’m just angry.” His eyes disappear into their sockets and his lower lip juts out as if to meet any incoming guff with a Gallic “Quoi?”.
But you’re still violent, I tell Cassel, reminding him of the unpleasant scene from his new Apple TV+ series Liaison, an Anglo-French six-part political thriller in which he stars as an international mercenary who attempts to combat cyber-attacks threatening the UK, alongside his ex-lover, played by Casino Royale star Eva Green. During an altercation in a London hotel lift he puts a Syrian computer hacker into a coma. “Yeah, but that’s my job,” says Cassel. “That’s different. It’s nothing personal. Strictly business.”
Irréversible, by contrast, was Cassel showing, as he puts it, “the animal inside all of us”. But it was the long rape sequence in the middle of the film that worried critics. When Bellucci’s character Alex was raped at knifepoint, followed by her attacker repeatedly thumping her head into a slab until she passed out, it was accused of being exploitative. That year in Cannes, even Cassel’s brother Mathias, a rapper, stood up at a screening and yelled: “Gaspar Noé – son of a bitch! We’re going to get you!”
Cassel still defends the film. “You know, everybody was spitting about this movie, saying it was horrible, it was vulgar, blah, blah, blah. I had people coming up to me and writing to me on the internet: ‘Man, I hate you. I have had nightmares about what you did.’” Cassel smiles. “Thank you very much. That’s the best compliment.”
A lot has happened in two decades. Cassel and Bellucci, who met each other on the set of Gilles Mimouni’s stylish 1996 Hitchcockian thriller L’Appartement, divorced in 2013 after 18 years. They have two daughters. Since 2018 he has been married to the French model Tina Kunakey, 31 years his junior, and has had a third daughter, who is three years old.
He has diversified, too, starring in Hollywood fare as much as French cinema. He was the French guy in Ocean’s Twelve and Thirteen; he was in Westworld; he was the scheming artistic director to Natalie Portman’s ballerina in Black Swan. In France, he’s best known for incarnating French gangster Jacques Mesrine, in the perhaps surprisingly watchable four hour-long, two-part César-Award winning 2008 biopic.
Certainly, the shaved-head banlieue bruiser from Mathieu Kassovitz’s still compelling 1995 black and white depiction of Paris’s underbelly, La Haine, with which he made his entrée into world cinema, has long gone. Today, Cassel presents like a taller Emmanuel Macron. His distinguished grey coiffure tones nicely with his black turtleneck and he’s sporting the kind of watch that suggests he’s not fretting about the cost of living crisis.
But one thing hasn’t changed. He’s still extremely wiry and buff, as several topless scenes apparently essential to the plot in Liaison disclose. At one point, his character, Gabriel Delage, is recuperating in a hotel room after being Tasered by one of the many cops tasked with taking him down. Even after the shooting, he manages to speed off in a car, heroically, with the stereotypically sweet Syrian mother illegal immigrant and baby whom he is trying to save from the authorities. In the hotel room, Eva Green, his former lover and ex-secret agent who – somehow – has since become a senior British civil servant is tending his sexy wounds. As we survey Cassel’s toned torso, we register that she still feels something for this antinomian hunk – even though she’s been living in London with a principled yet dull civil rights lawyer for the past five years.
Hold on, I say. Can you really drive a getaway car after being Tasered? “I’ve been studying this thing for a while,” he replies, after exhaling a cloud of vape steam. “Some people even – you can check it out on the net – get shot by a Taser and they stand up and they fight again. I mean, I keep on driving, but I have an accident a few metres later and I’m super tired afterwards. So yeah, this is realistic.”
In another scene, Cassel evades pursuing Brit plods by vaulting over a wall much taller than his 6ft 1in frame – a scene, he assures me, that required no body double. Impressive in your sixth decade, I say enviously. “Well, I’m still in shape, you know, but I take care of my instrument, let’s say, for professional and personal reasons. I’ve got a three-year-old. I have to be in shape. I’ve got to run with her. I’ve got throw her up in the air.”
My suspicion is that Liaison isn’t really about the two leads’ unfinished romantic business but – and there’s no easy way to say this – Brexit. We see London plunged into darkness, trains colliding, the Thames Barrier jamming as systems are hacked. The suggestion is that were the UK still under the EU’s cyber-security umbrella, we would be less exposed to such takedowns. Westminster’s finest are outfoxed and only the two leads are capable of defending Blighty. It’s as if, I tell Cassel, it takes two French actors – you and Eva Green – to save us from our Brexit stupidity. “I would never dare to say anything like that,” replies Cassel. “Don’t push. You won’t get me on that one. No, no, no, no.”
Later in the interview though, unbidden, he changes his mind. “You want me to tell you what I think? The English position in Europe has always been shady. The fact that you never moved to the euro means that it was no real plan to stay for a long time. You know, England is an island – and an island that is really close to America, whether we like it or not.” Viewed that way, he suggests, Liaison is an “extrapolation of what could happen post-Brexit”.
As research for the role, Cassel hung out with shadowy international mercenaries. “Those guys have been working for everybody – Saudis, Americans, Brits, Russians whoever – and they’re really seeing what’s behind the curtain. They know all the secrets. They know what runs the world. The real dirty politics. Not the mainstream ideas that we see on the news to make us react like sheep, you know?”
What struck him most, though, is that these men don’t advertise their skillsets. “They don’t look dangerous. They have to appear as wimps at some points. You might think that you can overpower him, but you can’t. It’s another way of showing what it is to be a man. You know, being a man is not trying to be a pumped man; it’s just taking your responsibility.”
Cassel has long suspected that the pumped-up action heroes of Hollywood movies give a distorted idea of what masculinity should be. He hopes his performance, based on this research, provides a corrective to what it is to be, not just a man, but a decisive man of action.
“I mean, look at what’s happening. Instagram and TikTok is full of people giving a fake idea. Men should be like this. Women should be like this, you know? I mean, it’s a total fantasy of what sexuality should be. And we tend to forget what it’s really about. It’s about being yourself.”
He has been following the story of self-styled misogynist and social-media influencer Andrew Tate, derided by Greta Thunberg for his “small dick energy” and currently facing rape and human trafficking charges in Romania. Isn’t he part of that fantasy, I ask Cassel? “There’s so many things he says, especially when you see his background that come across as really wrong. But in the middle of that, I think, he’s saying stuff that is actually interesting because he wants to defend masculinity. It’s almost shameful to be masculine these days. You have to be more feminine, more vulnerable. But listen, if men become too vulnerable and feminine, I think there’s going to be a problem.”
Isn’t there a risk that such attitudes collapse into misogyny? “I mean, I hope I’m not misogynistic. I’m surrounded by women. From morning to night, because I’ve got three daughters, a wife, an ex-wife, a mother.”
Cassel was born in Paris in 1966. His actor father Jean-Pierre starred in such classic French films as L’Armée des Ombres and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, as well as playing French characters in English-language movies – he was Louis XIII in Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers, for instance. It didn’t provide his son with the easiest start to his career. “I needed to detach myself from his image. So I lived in New York because I was dreaming about Spike Lee’s movies and Scorsese’s Taxi Driver,” he explains. “I couldn’t see how I could fit in to French cinema.”
But while living there with his mother Sabine Litique, the food editor for Elle magazine’s American edition, he had an epiphany. “In New York I realised I was super-French, actually, and that I was missing the bells and the streets in Montmartre where I grew up – and actual Camembert. So I went back to Paris and then I met people who felt exactly like me. They didn’t fit in with French cinema.”
Cassel will soon fly to Toronto to work on David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds. It’s the third time he will have worked with Cronenberg. “It’s the story of a man who loses his wife. It’s about the incapacity to cope with the loss of a loved one. I never thought he had such confidence in me and I’m really flattered. I told him: ‘David, honestly, I have no idea how I’m going to play this.’ And he said that’s exactly why he chose me.”
For all that, you might be forgiven for thinking that the former outcast has joined the French film establishment, leaving the avant garde and gritty depictions of Paris to others. It’s striking that some of his latest roles are in adaptations of evergreen French franchises, in which his father also appeared. He plays Athos in The Three Musketeers and Roman emperor Jules César in a new Asterix movie, which, he admits, got terrible reviews but did well at the box office – not that he minds.
“Finally,” he says, “I’m in a film I can take my three-year-old to see.” There was another reason for taking the role, though: for once, he can step out of the macho playbook. “I thought it was time for me to do a real comedy and, you know, to have fun in a miniskirt.”
Liaison is on Apple TV+ from 24 February
• This article was amended on 20 February 2023. An earlier version said that in Irréversible, Vincent Cassel’s character, Marcus, clubs to death the man who raped his wife. However, that scene shows Marcus’s friend clubbing to death a man, who Marcus thinks raped his wife.
